Posted by Dirk Schmidt | October 14, 2025 | General news

After presenting the first observations with the 1.6-meter Goode Solar Telescope (GST) using coronal adaptive optics of fine structures in cool plasma in the Sun’s corona at the 63-kilometer diffraction limit in May, we are now happy to announce the public release of science data taken since 2023 and invite the community to browse and use the data.

This new and unique data archive includes 30 hours of high-resolution observations using adaptive optics of various phenomena outside the solar disk such as different kinds of prominences (some with bubbles and plumes), coronal rain, loops, spicules, plasmoids and other intriguing highly-dynamic small-scale features.  These high-cadence data were taken with the GST’s Fabry-Pérot imaging spectrometers VIS and NIRIS in H-alpha (656 nm) and He I (1083 nm) downstream of the first-of-its-kind adaptive optics system Cona.

No need to download 342 GB of FITS files, you can just get lost in the over 80 quick-view videos.

Cona was developed by the US NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) of the New Jersey Institute of Technology as a pathfinder for the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and has recently been commissioned for scientific observations with the GST.

For more information, visit the blog post at NSO and the Cona Data Archive at BBSO.

The Cona Team
Dirk Schmidt (NSO, [email protected]), Vasyl Yurchyshyn (BBSO), Nicolas Gorceix (BBSO), Thomas Rimmele (NSO), Philip Goode (BBSO)