The Sun’s inner corona, coloured artificially to appear dark green, in an image taken on 23 May 2025 by the ASPIICS coronagraph aboard Proba-3, ESA’s formation-flying mission capable of creating artificial total solar eclipses in orbit.
The ASPIICS instrument captures the solar corona in two different ‘spectral lines’, each line corresponding to a different element contained in the coronal gases.
This image shows observations in the coronal green line – a spectral line emitted by iron atoms that lost half of their electrons due to extremely high temperatures. This allows us to see the hottest contents of the corona, at up to 2 million degrees. On the upper left side, a hot loop can be seen extending from the Sun’s surface into the corona, a structure which generally appears following a solar flare.
See more images from Proba-3’s first artificial solar eclipse here.
[Image description: This is an image of the Sun taken during an artificial solar eclipse. Against a black background, the Sun’s bright body is covered by a black disc, and blue-green hair-like tendrils extend from the black disc in all directions. Brighter green light peeks from behind the black disc’s edge, slowly fading towards the outer edges of the image.]