The ASPIICS coronagraph aboard ESA’s formation-flying Proba-3 mission is able to observe the Sun’s corona in the gap between the fields of view of solar extreme-ultraviolet imagers and conventional coronagraphs, making it uniquely suited for studies of the inner solar corona.
This time-lapse animation captures a coronal mass ejection (CME) in the top right, combining observations made on 16 July over a period of one hour and a half by three different European instruments aboard different missions: the Sun’s disc and low corona (artificially coloured in yellow), as captured by an extreme-ultraviolet telescope (SWAP) aboard Proba-2; the outer corona (in red) observed by the LASCO C2 coronagraph aboard SOHO; and the inner corona (in green), imaged in detail by Proba-3’s ASPIICS coronagraph, filling the gap.
Andrei Zhukov from the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Principal Investigator for the ASPIICS coronagraph on Proba-3, comments: “You can see the CME starting at the edge of the solar disc, captured by Proba-2. Then it extends into the inner coronal region, which is now visible to us thanks to Proba-3, before reaching the high corona observed by SOHO. The continuity with which we can now observe the CME structure extend outwards from the Sun is incredible.”
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