Optical obsdervations of the solar corona

The history of optical observations of the solar corona is traced through the development of lour topics: the observation of naturally occurring total solar eclipses, the discovery of forbidden emission lines in the solar corona, the development of narrow spectral bandpass observing techniques, and the invention of the coronagraph. These events occurred over a span of time from the middle of the last century until the present.Paper presented at the IX-th Lindau Workshop The Source Region of the Solar Wind.The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.