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PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere)

Viewing Posts from December 2025

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    NASA’s PUNCH Spies Comet Lemmon

    A black-and-white image shows a comet against a background of stars. At the top is a date and time stamp that reads 20251031 024829 UTC. Along the bottom and left sides are markers showing Right Ascension and Declination coordinates, respectively. A faint white tail stretches up and to the left away from the comet's bright white head, or coma, at the center of the image.

    In late 2025, as comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6) swept past the Sun and brightened in Earth’s night skies, NASA’s Earth-orbiting PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission was watching the comet blaze through its field of view, providing a natural tracer of the Sun’s effects across the inner solar system. Discovered in January […]

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    NASA’S PUNCH Releases Refined Images of Eruptions from the Sun

    The video displays a composite view of panels taken with several space-based images arranged in a clover-like layout. A black disk in the center is the coronagraph surrounded by an amber-hued background of space. Throughout the video, coronal mass ejections are represented by the white, wispy structures surrounding the black disk in the center and expanding outward, gradually becoming more diffuse as it travels across the field of view. Some regions in the video appear as black geometric shapes where no image data is available. A timestamp at the top advances continuously, indicating the real-time progression of the solar events. A white orb moving away from the center at the left is the planet Mercury. A white orb at the right of the frame represents the planet Venus. A small white orb with a “tail” at the top is comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon).

    NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission has released processed images of huge eruptions from the Sun, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), that occurred from Oct. 21 to Nov. 12. This release marks the first time PUNCH observations can be used to continuously trace solar eruptions from the Sun’s outer atmosphere […]

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    NASA’s PUNCH Tracks Comet Discovered by SOHO Spacecraft

    A comet with a bright, white head and a fainter white tail stretching to the lower left appears near the center of a field of stars. Two bright objects appear to the left of the comet's tail. White grid lines cross the field horizontally and vertically.

    From August to October, NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission tracked comet 2025 R2 (SWAN) — one of the thousands of comets discovered in images from the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) that launched 30 years ago Tuesday. Capturing a new image […]

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