NASA's PUNCH team recovers a year of corona images that Earthshine had swamped
NASA's PUNCH mission has released a video of a year of the sun's corona, recovered from images that Earthshine first overwhelmed. An outside solar scientist said the sunlit electrons in it show how many particles the corona holds and the shape of its magnetic field.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- PUNCH is four spacecraft, precisely aligned and calibrated, orbiting Earth over the poles so that the sun stays in constant view.
- The team treated each image as a four-million-dimensional vector to strip out the bright, flickering Earthshine and recover the whole year of coronal data.
- Sunlight scattering off coronal electrons makes magnetic field lines visible as bright golden rays, interspersed with coronal mass ejections.
- Background stars including Leo and part of Sagittarius slide behind the sun, while Venus and Mercury cross the frame as large white dots.
Why it matters
- What's now possible capability An outside scientist says the corona changes constantly under the solar wind and coronal mass ejections, and a year of frames lets that change be followed month by month.
- What it limits constraint Earthshine overwhelmed the corona's signal and had to be subtracted, so faint structure in the video is only as reliable as that subtraction.
- Who has to decide decision The only verdict on the processing in the coverage comes from the mission's own principal investigator, who calls the video a triumph, so anyone building on the frames needs an independent check.
The video exists because of a fix to a bad start. When PUNCH opened its eyes, sunlight reflecting off Earth bounced into the Narrow Field Imager's sensors and overwhelmed the faint signal from the corona [9]. At first, said principal investigator Craig DeForest, "you couldn't see a darn thing" [10]. The observations behind the video began in June 2025 [1].
Time is compressed in the playback. Leo passes behind the sun in August, around three to four minutes in, and part of Sagittarius appears in November at 6:20 to 7:20 [17]. Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS) passed very close to the sun on April 19, 2026, and shows up at 11:09 [14]. Known objects crossing at known dates give a rough check on the timeline, though the article does not offer them as validation. Taking the August and April marks together, we get roughly a minute of video per month of sky, so one second of playback covers something like half a day [18].
The physics on screen is plain enough. The corona is the topmost layer of the sun's atmosphere, and it is hotter than the layers beneath it by millions of degrees Fahrenheit [4]. DeForest said the protons and electrons there are too hot to coalesce into atoms, which leaves them free to become almost perfect electrical conductors [5]. According to the article, that conductivity makes the outflowing particles spiral along the sun's magnetic field lines [16].
In our view the sources support reading this as imaging of the outflow inside the corona. The thing this doesn't tell you is whether the video follows the solar wind back to where it starts. The imager works by blocking the sun itself [2], and the article cites no paper or error figures for the Earthshine removal.
What to watch
- A paper or data release that documents the Earthshine removal and its error, so others can test how much faint corona structure survives.
- Independent analyses of the processed frames by groups outside the PUNCH team.
- Whether the team ties the outflow in the frames to a specific source region of the solar wind.
Clarity's read
What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence60
Claim ledger
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
NASA's PUNCH mission has been observing the sun since June 2025.
- [2]
PUNCH avoids damage to its optics with a sunlight-blocking coronagraph that creates a permanent eclipse for its Narrow Field Imager.
- [3]
A video of PUNCH's newly processed data shows a year of the sun's corona.
- [4]
The solar corona is the topmost layer of the sun's atmosphere and is hotter than the layers beneath it by millions of degrees Fahrenheit.
- [5]
According to PUNCH principal investigator Craig DeForest, the protons and electrons in the corona cannot coalesce into atoms because of the heat, which leaves them free to become almost perfect electrical conductors.
- [6]
Sunlight scattering off the electrons makes magnetic field lines visible in the video as bright golden rays interspersed with coronal mass ejections.
- [7]
Alfred de Wijn, a research engineer at the National Science Foundation's High Altitude Observatory who is unaffiliated with PUNCH, said the sunlit electrons tell researchers about "the amount of particles in the corona and the shape of the magnetic field".
- [8]
PUNCH consists of four separate spacecraft, precisely aligned and calibrated, that orbit Earth over the poles and stay in constant view of the sun.
- [9]
When PUNCH first began observing, Earthshine (sunlight reflecting off Earth) bounced into its sensors and overwhelmed the delicate signal from the corona.
- [10]
DeForest said that at first "you couldn't see a darn thing".
- [11]
The research team used image processing that treated each image as a four-million-dimensional vector to remove the bright, flickering Earthshine and recover the entire year's worth of coronal data, creating the video.
- [12]
DeForest calls the video "a triumph" because it shows how the Narrow Field Imager overcame an unexpected problem.
- [13]
Background stars slide from left to right behind the sun, including Leo and part of Sagittarius, and Venus and Mercury cross the frame several times as large, bright white dots.
- [14]
Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS) passed very close to the sun on April 19, 2026, and appears in the video at 11:09.
- [15]
De Wijn said the corona is constantly changing as a result of the solar wind and coronal mass ejections.
- [16]
Because of the near-perfect electrical conductivity, the outflowing protons and electrons spiral along the sun's magnetic field lines as they traverse the corona.
- [17]
Leo passes behind the sun in August, around three to four minutes into the video, and part of Sagittarius is visible in November, around 6:20 to 7:20.
- [18]
The video runs at roughly one minute of playback per month of sky, so one second of playback covers something like half a day.
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Sources
1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.
- scientificamerican.comStunning video reveals the year-round dance of the sun’s corona
1 article · October 14, 2026
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