Coronal streamers revealed during solar eclipses: Seeing is not believing and pictures can lie

摘要

For those fortunate enough to have personally witnessed and photographed the visible corona surrounding the Sun during a solar eclipse, pictures are usually a let down for not living up to the visual view. After 150 years of investigating the corona, we understand it more fully and now know this difference to be real. The difference stems from our inability to either see or image the true distribution of simultaneous brightness because of its large dynamic range (eg, Rodriguez, Woods, 2008 Digital Image Processing, Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall). Brightness in the corona is unprecedented, as it falls by three orders of magnitude over a distance of only one solar radius from the Sun.