2012 Venus Transit
-
- Visualizations by:
- Walt Feimer
- View full credits
Movie showing an artist's conception of the 2012 Venus transit. Starting on the surface of Venus, the camera pulls up through the planets clouds and flies back towards Earth to watch Venus's transit accross the Sun.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
-
Animator
- Walt Feimer (KBR Wyle Services, LLC) [Lead]
Related Pages
-
-
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. ||
-
ID: 10978 Produced Video
Venus Transit
Read moreOn June 5, 2012 at 6:03 p.m. EDT, the planet Venus will cross directly between Earth and the sun—a journey completed only six times since the invention of the telescope. To spectators, the planet will appear as a black dot moving from left to right across the sun's bright disk. Among the rarest planetary alignments, the transit of Venus follows an odd cycle: Two occur eight years apart, and then 105 or 121 years pass until one happens again. After June 5, the next transit will come about in 2117. The precise moments when Venus appears and disappears from Earth's field of view are of particular significance. In the 18th century, scientists used the timing of the transit to improve early calculations of the distance between the sun and Earth. The videos below show how Venus will make its final transit of the century. ||
-