What is that? Observing in the Sun’s corona at 63 kilometers resolution…

“Observing plasma phenomena in the Sun’s corona at the diffraction limit of large ground-based telescopes” - what still sounded like a keen vision only 3 years ago is now reality.

Ever since HAO’s founder Walter Orr Roberts produced his captivating videos of prominences in the 1940’s at the Climax Observatory, turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere has limited the resolution from the ground to many hundreds of kilometers, and little is still known about plasma dynamics in the corona at scales below 100 km. 

Adaptive optics (AO) that compensate turbulence and recover the diffraction limit became a standard technique since their advent in the late 90’s, revolutionizing observations and our picture of the Sun. However, until recently, even the most advanced AO systems were only capable to target within the solar disk and hence they still left fine detail far above the limb hidden in the atmospheric blur.

Join this talk to see prominences in unparalleled clarity and features well below 100 km thanks to a breakthrough in AO with the Goode Solar Telescope (GST).

Cona, the first coronal adaptive optics system, was developed by the National Solar Observatory and the New Jersey Institute of Technology and enables observations in the Sun’s corona at the H⍺ diffraction limit of 63 km. Cona revealed the finest strands in coronal rain to date and a puzzling short-lived feature with not-readily explained dynamics far below the resolution of other observations from the ground and from space.

Over 30 hours of high-resolution H⍺ and He I line-scan data from GST/VIS and NIRIS of various types of prominences, coronal rain, plasmoids, spicules, plumes, and bubbles, as well as other features are now publicly available. We will take a look at the highlights and most intriguing examples.