Deriving the electron density of the solar corona from the inversion of total brightness measurements

Usually, the electron density structure of the white-light solar corona is estimated from the inversion of polarized brightness measurements. The inversion technique was developed in the 1950s and has remained largely unchanged since. Here, for the first time, we expand this technique to total brightness observations to take advantage of the extensive Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraphs (LASCO) archive. We compare our technique to both theoretical coronal models and actual observations and show that it is as robust and accurate as the widely used polarized brightness inversion. The quantitative analysis of white-light coronal data critically depends on the removal of the F corona. We briefly describe an improved F corona model we derived using the LASCO time series data.