The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
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Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
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Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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This is a colour composite image made from a ground-based eclipse image obtained by the Williams College Eclipse Expedition in Gabon and a wide-field EUV mosaic of the solar corona obtained (more or less) simultaneously in space by SWAP onboard PROBA2.
The image shows the ground-based WL observation in blue and the EUV SWAP image in gold. SWAP observes emission lines from Fe IX/X at about 174 Å, corresponding to plasma at about 0.8 MK, while the eclipse image is insensitive to temperature. As a result, the eclipse contribution to the combined image allows us to see the global coronal structure, while the EUV reveals only those parts of the corona at about a million degrees.