PUNCH News & Nuggets

With PUNCH's gigantic field of view (90 degrees across!) we can now visually track solar storms as they move through the solar wind. Using that huge field of view requires new visualization tools. The images and linked movies above show a "halo" (Earth-directed) coronal mass ejection (CME) that produced a modest radiation storm mere hours after the Artemis II astronauts were launched from Kennedy Space Flight Center on their historic trip to return to the Moon. The left column of the four-image panel shows the fast-moving CME (850 km/sec, accelerating at 414 m/s^2) caught close to the Sun by the NSF/NCAR Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) K-Coronagraph (K-Cor), the right column of the four-image panel shows the CME stretching across the fields of view of K-Cor, the NASA/SOHO/LASCO and NOAA/GOES/CCOR-1, and PUNCH, and the single, larger image shows the CME still moving across the PUNCH field of view in an extreme zoom-out from the Sun about thirteen hours after Artemis II launched at 22:35 UT on April 1, 2026. Solar radiation was closely monitored throughout the Artemis mission in order to warn astronauts to seek protection in case a large solar energetic proton (SEP) event occurred. Fortunately the SEP event associated with this CME was modest, falling just short of a S1 level radiation storm. Since SEPs can be accelerated throughout a CME's passage through the solar wind, PUNCH's global view may well prove critical for space weather situational awareness. Further observations and analysis of this event can be found at the MLSO Gallery page.

With the support of the PUNCH Outreach program and NASA’s Heliophysics Education Activation Team, Service Unit 654 of the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland led a camping trip May 1-3 during which 165 Girl Scouts earned their Space Science badge and Ancient and Modern Sun-Watching patch. The badge and patch were earned over the course of the weekend through a series of activity stations. Girl Scouts of the USA have offered the Space Science badge series for kindergarten through twelfth graders since 2019. The Ancient and Modern Sun-Watching patch uses the PUNCH public Outreach products that are available for everyone and browsable at the PUNCH website, curated in the patch activities for the Girl Scout experience. This group of K-12 Girl Scouts are the first Girl Scouts ever to officially earn the Ancient and Modern Sun-Watching patch.

We invite the community to attend the seventh PUNCH (Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere) Science Meeting from May 12th through the 14th, 2026 in Boulder, Colorado. As of May 2025, PUNCH has been taking observations, and everyone is invited to share their early results from these data. Topical science sessions will be organized around the themes of the origin and evolution of the ambient solar wind and turbulence within it and the physics, tracking, and predictability of transient events including CMEs, CIRs, and shocks.

PUNCH produces composite white light images of half the sky, centered on the Sun, every ~30 min. PUNCH Scientists (T. Kuchar & D. Webb) use consecutive images over a period of hours to days to track Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and other transient outflows, using height-time maps.

Parker Solar Probe (PSP) orbits the Sun three times per year in a highly elliptical orbit, passing through the corona itself at perihelion. PUNCH stays at Earth, surveying the entire inner solar system. PSP is always within the PUNCH field-of-view, allowing joint cross-scale studies of coronal and solar wind physics. This movie and still image, made by the PUNCH Science Operations Center’s Sam Van Kooten, highlight that relationship. The PUNCH intermediate-data-product movie (F corona removed; starfield intact) at left shows the Parker Solar Probe orbit. The overlain geometry shows the field of view of the WISPR instrument on board PSP. WISPR looks out from PSP through the imaged projection planes, producing the grayscale images at right (courtesy G. Stenborg, WISPR Consortium).

PUNCH Wide Field Images are now able to provide 3-D reconstructions of the inner heliosphere over time1. The PUNCH 90-degree view around the Sun from Earth captures images of the outward-moving heliospheric structures. For this analysis, these images have had the f-corona, stellar residuals, and stray light removed. Computerized tomography analysis converts these images into perspective views of outward-moving space weather systems.

Heliophysicists have produced the first continuous, two-dimensional maps of the Sun’s Alfvén surface – the region of space where the solar wind irrevocably escapes the grip of the Sun’s magnetic field – and demonstrated the dynamical variation of its properties as our star moves through its activity cycle. Beyond this boundary, the speed of outflowing solar material becomes faster than the speed of magnetic waves, marking an effective outer “edge” of the solar atmosphere. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (Badman et al. 2025) and co-authored by PUNCH Co-I Rohit Chhiber, the study employed a combination of in-situ measurements and magnetic models from several space missions spanning a range of distances from the Sun, to infer the location of the Alfvén surface in the Sun’s equatorial plane, thereby providing a “top-down” view (looking downwards from above the solar system) of its probable shape. Tracking the surface’s evolution from 2018 (when the Sun was dormant) to 2025 (when it was highly active) revealed that its distance from the Sun, its thickness, and its “spikiness” increased with solar activity.