We introduce a new invariant, the coronal of a graph, and use it to compute the spectrum of the corona $G\circ H$ of two graphs $G$ and $H$. In particular, we show that this spectrum is completely determined by the spectra of $G$ and $H$ and the coronal of $H$. Previous work has computed the spectrum of a corona only in the case that $H$ is regular. We then explicitly compute the coronals for several families of graphs, including regular graphs, complete $n$-partite graphs, and paths. Finally, we use the corona construction to generate many infinite families of pairs of cospectral graphs.

9 pages