Authors: Sarah Bruce (University of Colorado Boulder), Kevin Reardon (National Solar Observatory)

During the total solar eclipses of 20 April, 2023 in Exmouth, Australia and 8 April, 2024 in Texas, we carried out several experiments aiming at investigating the low solar corona. We used a low dispersion (0.28 Å/pixel) slit spectrograph to obtain spectra covering the interval from 3600-4700 Å between 1-1.5 solar radii. The scattering of the photospheric emission by the high-temperature, high-velocity coronal electrons smears out any Fraunhoffer lines, but leaves broad spectral signatures that can be used to infer the magnitude of the broadening and hence the coronal electron temperature (Cram, 1976). Such measurements have been carried out a few times in the past (e.g. Ichimoto, et al., 1996; Reginald, 2009) and are the basis of the upcoming CODEX mission. We will describe our experimental setup and present our analysis of these spectra, which also show several emission lines in this wavelength interval. We further obtained slit jaw images of the K-corona above an active region, which show small scale structures which we compare with images from SDO/AIA and GONG/H-alpha. Additionally, using the FORWARD software package from HAO, we modeled the white-light corona at the time of the eclipses. Using the FOWARD framework we wrote code to simulate an intensity spectrum integrated along the line of sight for each point in the corona, which we compare to data observed in the eclipses.