Narrow-band Filter Observations of the Red-Line Corona at the 29 March 2006 Eclipse

We report on observations of the corona above active region NOAA 10866, which was on the solar east limb at S 06 on 29 March 2006. Filtergrams were obtained at six 0.22 Å steps across the profile of the Fe X line at 6374.5 Å during the total solar eclipse, starting at about 1052 UT. The telescope was a 35-cm Schmidt-Cassegrain Meade RCX400 with the solar image relayed to a 512 x 512-pixel Andor Ixon DV887 CCD camera via telecentric optics and two narrow-bandpass filters: (1) a 2 Å thin-film Andover Corp. blocker and (2) a 0.16 Å tunable Fabry-Perot etalon, made by the CSIRO Australian Centre for Precision Optics. The F-P etalon is a Y-cut lithium niobate wafer of 0.200-mm thickness coated with reflective and conductive thin-film layers. Application of a voltage to the etalon produces a passband shift of 0.0011 Å/volt. Calibration at the eclipse site in Kastellorizo, Greece, was maintained by reference to a WSTech thermo-electrically stabilized diode laser tuned to 6375.16 Å. The profile and Doppler shifts of the Fe X line will be discussed.The expedition was supported by NSF (ATM-0552116), the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society, NASA's Planetary Astronomy Division for the CCD cameras (NNG04GE48G), Sigma Xi, and the Rob Spring Fund and the Ryan Patrick Gaishin Fund at Williams College.