SDO/SOHO: Pick of the Week (2012 Jun 08)

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Click to play embedded YouTube video.

SDO: Transit of Venus

A good portion of the world was watching as Venus glided in front of the Sun for over six hours (June 5 - 6, 2012). SDO implemented specially planned operations to view the event in great detail in many wavelengths of light. The results were the best HD views of a transit ever taken. The image and movie shown here were taken in the 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme UV light. Numerous image and movie versions of the Venus transit as seen by SDO can be found here. The approach of Venus towards the Sun as seen by the SOHO coronagraphs can be seen here.

SOHO: Venus Transit Path

The Transit of Venus (June 5-6, 2012) was a much-watched astronomical event to say the least. Probably the best view of it was from the Solar Dynamics Observatory orbiting around Earth and about 20,000 miles above it. In the still image, this sequence of transit images in extreme UV light was composited together to show the path of Venus over the six plus hours. The video clip in the same wavelength of light shows the transit in motion.

SDO's Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit

Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun's atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate. SDO provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television and returns more than a terabyte of data each day.

On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event--the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.

The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.

Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO

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