An image of stray sunlight and the moon taken on April 27 by the PUNCH mission’s Narrow Field Imager during commissioning – credit, Southwest Research Institute

An absolutely staggering new perception of our Moon and Sun was captured by a little-known NASA mission called PUNCH.

Showing a halo of light surrounding an eclipsed sun with the Moon passing through, it was taken during PUNCH’s commissioning stage—a step to ensure all the equipment is in alignment and functioning properly.

The Moon in the image is lit up by light reflected off the surface of Earth.

Launched on March 11th, the four-satellite constellation was designed to study to solar wind by using a science instrument called an occulter. With extreme precision, an occulter places a disk over the Sun before photographing it.

The large golden aura is formed from the incoming light reflected off the sun-side of the occulter, while a shred of light can be seen around the Sun’s corona, or crown. This is the Sun’s outermost atmosphere, and the easiest place the study the solar wind.

Solar wind amounts to about 300,000 tons (272,000 metric tons) of material which the Sun ejects into the solar system every second. Made up of charged particles, they are responsible for the Northern lights down on Earth, and also a variable amount of disruption to Earthborn electronics.

It’s believed that streamers and plasma loops bursting out of the Sun which PUNCH will photograph can be tracked and used to estimate and forecast space weather like the solar wind, perhaps allowing countries to better prepare for incoming magnetic storms which could disrupt communications or even cause sudden blackouts.

A solar prominence, or hot plasma loop, imaged by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in extreme ultraviolet light with Earth added for scale – credit NASA SDO

Complementing PUNCH’s mission will be the more famous craft called the Parker Solar Probe, which in 2021 became the first manmade object to enter the Sun’s atmosphere and exit it intact. Whilst doing so, it took some pretty epic photos itself, and the imaging potential of the two crafts will allow scientists to study our star in much greater detail.

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“[Parker Solar Probe] and PUNCH are both working to unite two separate branches of heliophysics into a unified whole,” PUNCH’s principal investigator, Craig DeForest, told Live Science in an email.

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“PSP is carrying the techniques of space physics (in-situ sampling) inward to touch and measure the solar corona. PUNCH is extending the techniques of solar physics (scientific imaging) outward to measure how the solar corona touches us. The two missions complement each other beautifully.”

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