NFI sees a CME
This is a PUNCH Science Nugget
The PUNCH/NFI coronagraph revealed beautiful, detailed structure in a CME departing the Sun on 6/3/2025. Preliminary images like this one demonstrate that the instrument is working well and the Science Operations Center is making progress toward full, routine, polarized imaging from this challenging instrument, as PUNCH enters science operations.
Although PUNCH is still finishing up commissioning, it is beginning to produce scientifically interesting data. This image is an example: while the complete data processing pipeline is still being refined, the instrument is producing data that reveal the breathtaking beauty of the solar corona and the detailed structure that is the subject of PUNCH science. This image of the corona, during the eruption of a large CME on 6/3/2025, shows the detailed, wispy structure of the background corona and the CME itself.
PUNCH/NFI is a high resolution coronagraph, with a field of view a little larger than the constellation Orion. Analyzing NFI data is challenging because, although the instrument is in very good focus and the CCD camera has exquisite performance, each individual image is affected by a different pattern of stray light as the spacecraft orbits Earth. When complete, the Science Operations Center pipeline will routinely remove over 99% of the light (in the form of steady and variable stray light from the Sun and Earth, respectively, as well as the Sun’s dusty “F corona”) from each image. Sophisticated mathematics, including 4-million-dimensional “principal component analysis” and “large sparse matrix inversion”, help separate the stray light from the corona using patterns in both space and time. Images like this one show that the instrument is working and generating the high quality data needed to make that analysis work.
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