A transit is when a planet passes directly between the Sun and the Earth and we see the planet as a small dot moving slowly across the face of the Sun. A Venus transit occurred in 2004 (see Venus Transit from GOES/SXI). Prior to that it was 1882. The last Venus transit occurred on June 5-6, 2012 and the next one won't occur until 2117 (See the NASA Eclipse Web Site).
To understand the significance of these events, it helps to know the history of how the Venus transits provided one of the first estimates of the size of the Solar System, and eventually the Universe (see A Brief History of the Transit of Venus).
In this visualization, there are a few things which should be noted.
1) The camera view is NOT from anywhere on the surface of the Earth, but corresponds to an observer positioned along the Earth-Sun line, but over the north pole of the Earth. This causes the path of Venus to cross the solar disk lower (closer to the solar equator) than it would appear to an observer on the surface of the Earth.
2) The ephemeris used for computing the planetary positions was not the high-precision JPL ephemeris (DE-421), but a lower-precision approximation. Yet, when tracked in detail, the transit takes place only about five hours later. It was decided that since the view of the transit in this visual does not correspond to any actual location ON the Earth, it might be misleading to present high-precision timing of the event.
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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. || ", "release_date": "2012-06-05T00:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2025-01-12T00:19:38.737288-05:00", "main_image": { "id": 475645, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010900/a010996/AIA171A_Venus_Transit_20120605T211212new_web.jpg", "filename": "AIA171A_Venus_Transit_20120605T211212new_web.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "193 angstrom image from SDO", "width": 319, "height": 191, "pixels": 60929 } }, { "id": 10978, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10978/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "Venus Transit", "description": "On 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. || ", "release_date": "2012-05-29T00:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2023-05-03T13:53:03.323211-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 476006, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010900/a010978/Venustransit_2004-06-08_07-44_1024x576.jpg", "filename": "Venustransit_2004-06-08_07-44_1024x576.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "It's the most infrequent, predictable occurrence in the heavens, and it's happening soon.", "width": 1024, "height": 576, "pixels": 589824 } } ], "sources": [], "products": [], "newer_versions": [], "older_versions": [], "alternate_versions": [] }