SOHO LASCO View of Approaching Venus Transit
The LASCO C2 and C3 coronographs on board the SOHO spacecraft have been watching the approach of Venus for its last solar transit until 2117.
With coronagraphs, the Sun is being blocked by an occulting disk, seen here in blue, so that SOHO can observe the much fainter features in the Sun's corona. The actual size of the Sun is represented by the white disk.
The transit of Venus begins tomorrow, June 5, at about 6pm Eastern Daylight Time, or about 10pm Universal Time. It will last approximately 6 hours.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
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Video editor
- Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
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Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
Tapes
This visualization originally appeared on the following tapes:-
Transit of Venus
(ID: 2012043)
Monday, June 4, 2012 at 4:00AM
Produced by - Robert Crippen
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ID: 10996 Produced Video
SDO's Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit
Read moreLaunched 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. ||
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