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While our Sun may appear boring at first glance, the solar corona, the outermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere, is dynamic and highly structured. Changes in the complex magnetic field can lead to huge amounts of energy being dumped into the coronal plasma. This energy heats the plasma, but can also lead to dramatic space weather events, like flares or coronal mass ejections (CMEs). In this talk, I'll give an overview of observations of the solar corona, both past and present, and provide a current perspective on research in the field of solar physics. In particular, I'll focus on the current understanding of how the corona is heated to nearly a thousand times the temperature of the solar surface and how solar physicists are working to solve this so-called "coronal heating problem."

ChiantiPy is an interface to the CHIANTI atomic database for astrophysical spectroscopy. The highly-cited CHIANTI project, now in its 20th year, is an invaluable resource to the solar physics community. The ChiantiPy project brings the power of the scientific Python stack to the CHIANTI database, allowing solar physicists and astronomers to easily make use of this atomic data and calculate commonly used quantities from it such as radiative loss rates and emissivities for particular atomic transitions. In this talk, we will briefly discuss the history of the CHIANTI database and the ChiantiPy project as well as the current state of the project and its place in the solar physics community. We will demonstrate some of the capabilities of the ChiantiPy code and show examples of how ChiantiPy can be used in both modeling and observational studies. Finally, we'll discuss how ChiantiPy helps to bring the power of the CHIANTI atomic database to the growing set of astronomy-related tools in Python.

Understanding the frequency of energy release in non-flaring active region cores is critical to understanding how the quiescent corona is heated. We use efficient hydrodynamic loop models combined with an extrapolated magnetic field skeleton and advanced forward modeling to create global active region models in order to investigate observable signatures for a range of heating frequencies. We predict the response in all channels of both the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) and the EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) by calculating the emissivity for the relevant ions using CHIANTI, incorporating non-equilibrium ionization by solving the ionization balance equations, folding this information through the appropriate instrument response functions, and then mapping it to the extrapolated field geometry. Using these synthesized observations, we calculate typical observables, including the emission measure distribution and spectral line widths (for wavelength-resolved observations), in order to understand how properties of the heating might be better diagnosed through such observable signatures. We also discuss how the underlying structure of the extrapolated field is related to the observed multi-thermal coronal emission (if at all). Additionally, our forward-modeling software has been developed to be both modular and generally applicable. We briefly discuss how this framework for synthesizing observations might be useful to others in the solar physics/coronal loops community.