qorona 0.4.0

Documentation · Quickstart · Products · HPC guide

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

Install

With pip (the latest release):

pip install qorona

With conda (the development version, from source):

git clone https://github.com/RayanDhib/Qorona.git
cd Qorona
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate qorona

On a cluster, install from PyPI into a plain virtual environment; the installation guide has the details.

Quickstart

The quickstart data, coconut_corona.CFmesh.xz (~165 MB, an example COCONUT solution), is a release asset: download it into data/. The pipeline splits at its natural cost seam: build the viewpoint-independent Q⊥ volume once, then render any number of viewpoints off it in seconds.

# 1. Inspect a solution (model, mesh, variables, boundaries), no rendering.
qorona info data/coconut_corona.CFmesh.xz --timestamp 2025-10-09T18:19:52

# 2. Build the viewpoint-independent Q⊥ volume once (the minutes-scale stage).
qorona build data/coconut_corona.CFmesh.xz -o data/coconut_corona.qor \
    --timestamp 2025-10-09T18:19:52 --outer-radius 8

# 3. Render any number of viewpoints off that volume (seconds each).
qorona render data/coconut_corona.qor -o data/eclipse.png --fov 8 --longitude 317 --latitude 6.2

How it works

Four stages behind clean interfaces: read and resample the native solution onto an internal spherical grid; trace field lines and transport deviation vectors along them; assemble the squashing factor Q⊥ into a viewpoint-independent volume (cached to a dependency-free .qor); integrate log₁₀ Q⊥ along the line of sight on a plane-of-sky camera.

Supported models

Qorona is model-agnostic: each coronal model and file format sits behind a common reader interface, so the whole pipeline runs on any solution once a reader exists. Currently supported: COCONUT (COOLFluiD .CFmesh, Tecplot .plt) and MAS (HDF4). A contributor guide for adding a reader is planned.

Citing

If you use Qorona, please cite both the software and its accompanying paper.

Software (all versions), via the Zenodo concept DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20630699.

Paper (under review at The Astrophysical Journal; the reference will be updated when it is published):

Dhib, R., Ben Ameur, F., Baratashvili, T., Jeong, H.-J., Wang, H., Noraz, Q., Schmieder, B., Lani, A., & Poedts, S. Qorona: Open, Model-Agnostic Line-of-Sight Rendering of the Perpendicular Squashing Factor for Eclipse-like Coronal Imaging. Submitted to The Astrophysical Journal (2026).

@article{dhib2026qorona,
  author  = {Dhib, Rayan and Ben Ameur, Firas and Baratashvili, Tinatin and
             Jeong, Hyun-Jin and Wang, Haopeng and Noraz, Quentin and
             Schmieder, Brigitte and Lani, Andrea and Poedts, Stefaan},
  title   = {{Qorona: Open, Model-Agnostic Line-of-Sight Rendering of the
             Perpendicular Squashing Factor for Eclipse-like Coronal Imaging}},
  journal = {The Astrophysical Journal},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {Submitted}
}

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.