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

  • Released Tuesday, June 5, 2012
  • Updated Friday, October 9, 2015 at 1:17PM
  • ID: 10996

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 lasted approximately 6 hours and happens in pairs eight years apart, which 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.

193 Showing Venus completely off the limb and backlit by only the corona.

193 Showing Venus completely off the limb and backlit by only the corona.



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO


Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Tapes

This visualization originally appeared on the following tapes:
  • None

Datasets used in this visualization

SDO AIA 171 (A.K.A. 171 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER
SDO AIA 304 (A.K.A. 304 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER
SDO SDO Continuum (A.K.A. Continuum) (Collected with the HMI sensor)

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.



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