Qorona

Qorona⊥

Synthetic coronal imagery from global MHD solutions

Qorona turns a global coronal MHD solution into eclipse-like synthetic imagery. Its primary product is a line-of-sight integral of the perpendicular magnetic squashing factor Q⊥, the quantity that lights up the thin loops, streamers, and current sheets seen at a total solar eclipse. The result is rendered for morphological comparison against eclipse and coronagraph observations.

coronal MHD solution ──▶ read ──▶ resample ──▶ Q⊥ volume ──▶ LOS render ──▶ synthetic eclipse image

How this image was made

The example solution, built once and rendered once:

qorona build data/coconut_corona.CFmesh.xz -o data/coconut_corona.qor \
    --timestamp 2025-10-09T18:19:52 --frame carrington --outer-radius 8
qorona render data/coconut_corona.qor -o data/eclipse.png \
    --fov 8 --longitude 317 --latitude 6.2

Get started with the installation, grab the example data, and make your first eclipse image.

Products: the squashing-factor render, the polarity view, white-light imaging, Q-maps, and field lines, each with the exact command that produced its figure.

How it runs: the Q⊥ volume (build once, render many), camera and viewpoint, GPU acceleration, export to JHelioviewer, and, on clusters, the HPC guide.