Authors: Sarah Bruce (University of Colorado Boulder), Kevin Reardon (NSO)

Measuring the temperature of the different constituents of the coronal plasma can provide information on the heating mechanisms and the acceleration of the solar wind. However, measuring the thermal temperature of the electrons in the lower corona using remote sensing techniques can be challenging, because of the low signal and sparse diagnostics. During the eclipse of 20 April, 2023 in Exmouth, Australia, we carried out an experiment aiming at measuring the continuum spectrum of the lower solar corona covering the interval from 3600-4700 Å between 1-1.5 R_☉. The scattering of the photospheric emission by the high-temperature, high-velocity coronal electrons smears out any Fraunhofer lines, but the residual, broad spectral signatures remain. The magnitude of the broadening creating these features can be used to infer the coronal electron temperature (Cram, 1976). Such measurements have been carried out only a few times in the past (e.g. Ichimoto, et al., 1996; Reginald, 2009). We compare the retrieved temperatures with values from differential emission measures (DEM) derived from multiple instruments: SDO/AIA and SUVI.