Venus Transit 2012 Composited Visuals

  • Released Monday, June 11th, 2012
  • Updated Friday, August 25th, 2023 at 12:02AM
  • ID: 3941

These visualizations were generated by compositing the small field-of-view, high-cadence closeups of Venus with the full-disk, low-cadence imagery from Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Two different instruments are used: the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) which sees light in the visible range, and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) which sees light in several wavelengths in the ultraviolet range. To find out more information about these instruments, check out The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly Tutorial.

Some artifacts may be visible from the compositing, but you have to look pretty closely to see them.

The color table threshold was raised for these images, reducing the amount of noise visible in the images.

Note: There is an interesting artifact worthy of mention and clarification, and that is as Venus crosses the solar limb, the limb appears to be visible through the planet in some of the imagers (most notably the ultraviolet channels). Discussion with the scientists who built the imagers suggest this might be 'crosstalk' between the readouts of the four CCD panels that make up a complete image. It is an artifact of the imaging system.



Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio


Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Datasets used in this visualization

SDO AIA 171 (A.K.A. 171 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER 2012-06-05T21:12 - 2012-06-06T05:24
SDO AIA 304 (A.K.A. 304 Filter) (Collected with the AIA sensor)
JOINT SCIENCE OPERATIONS CENTER 2012-06-05T21:12 - 2012-06-06T05:24
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.