The European Space Agency has released the first images from Proba-3, a pair of 340-kilogram minisatellites that flew 150 metres apart in March to stage the world’s first artificial total solar eclipse. The Occulter spacecraft blocked the Sun with a 1.4-metre disc, allowing the Coronagraph, equipped with ESA’s ASPIICS instrument, to capture the normally invisible solar corona without interference from direct sunlight. The pictures, unveiled on 16 June, show fine structures in the million-degree outer atmosphere that drive solar wind and coronal mass ejections. Maintaining their alignment to within one millimetre using GPS, star trackers, lasers and radio links, the twins held totality for several hours—far longer than the few-minute duration of natural eclipses. Proba-3 orbits Earth every 19.6 hours and is designed to repeat the manoeuvre roughly twice a week, providing scientists with more than 1,000 hours of eclipse time during its two-year prime mission. The €200-million project, involving companies and institutes in 14 ESA member states, was launched on 5 December 2024 by an Indian PSLV-XL rocket. The breakthrough comes as NASA released separate images from the Parker Solar Probe, which skimmed within 6.1 million kilometres of the Sun on 24 December 2024—the closest approach by any spacecraft. Those pictures, published in mid-July, resolve solar wind streams and merging coronal mass ejections that can disrupt power grids and satellites on Earth. Together, the Parker and Proba-3 data sets are expected to sharpen space-weather forecasting and deepen understanding of why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the solar surface.