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.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
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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A composite of space- and ground-based observations gathered at the time of the solar eclipse on 2 July 2019, combining imagery from the ESA/NASA SOHO and ESA's Proba-2 satellites with observations performed by the ESA-CESAR team in Chile.
At the centre, an extreme-ultraviolet image of the solar disc taken by the Royal Observatory of Belgium’s SWAP instrument aboard ESA’s Proba-2 mission shows the surface of the Sun (depicted in grey scale). The surrounding inner corona (also shown in grey scale) is revealed through ground-based observations obtained during the totality phase of the eclipse with a 10-cm refractor telescope (600mm focal lenght) at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The outer corona is depicted through the white-light LASCO-C2 (shown in red) and C3 (shown in blue) coronagraph instruments aboard the ESA/NASA SOHO satellite.
The composite image provides an overall view of the Sun and its surrounding corona, with several streamers – elongated structures that extend from the solar surface far out into space. It shows the power of combining ground-based observations of the corona, which provide fine details of the inner corona and can only be obtained during a total eclipse, with the broader context yielded by coronographs like those on SOHO, which can observe the wider corona.