Authors: C. Gilly (NWRA)

The PUNCH mission images the young solar wind across a field of view that spans several orders of magnitude in heliocentric distance, from the inner corona out into the heliosphere. Placing those data in context, however, requires stitching them together with imagers that see closer to the Sun; no single instrument covers the full range, and the familiar plane-of-sky frame grows increasingly awkward as one moves far off-limb, where brightness also falls steeply with radius. We explore how to build, and how best to display, a seamless composite that spans this range.

We assemble a chain of co-temporal images — SDO/AIA, MLSO/COSMO K-Cor, SOHO/LASCO C2 and C3, GOES/CCOR-1, and PUNCH — onto a common frame, illustrated here with a coronal mass ejection observed on 2026 April 1. Rather than resample every instrument onto one grid, we forward-project each image at its native resolution, normalize each with the Radial Histogram Equalization Filter to tame the steep radial falloff, and match brightness across the seams, so that structure flows continuously from the solar disk to roughly 100 R☉. We then compare projections — plane-of-sky, log-radial, and a log-polar form in which the Sun sits at the center and radius is mapped logarithmically — to ask which renders this multi-scale field most intuitively.

Notably, the log-polar projection turns each instrument’s field of view into a concentric shell and brings the inner corona and the outer heliosphere onto a single, legible footing. We present the composite as a simple, reusable visualization tool and discuss its use for following solar-wind and CME features across the corona–heliosphere boundary.