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

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 happens in pairs eight years apart that 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.

This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/...

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• Category

  Science & Technology

[Vickers Field]

That was effing awesome! If you felt small before - well it just put that thought into perspective....  President Obama, please give NASA more money!

[stasucan]

Is Venus 80% transparent ? lol. Wtf ?

[Raphael Wedd]

just imagine if all the money that goes into war went into nasa.... makes me smile just thinking about it. I wonder when Mankind will grow up and stop shooting each other and shoot for the moon again.

[Raphael Wedd]

its the glow reaching around the planet silly

[Darkex23]

Hes not in control of that.... there are people above the president you know..... and they arent the nicest people on the planet

[Mike Morrison]

Uuummm....what? The president's job (well, his office) is to design a budget, then propose it to Congress. While "the budget" is a relatively new function, it is really no different than his power to propose new laws to Congress. The president has ALWAYS had that power since the foundation of this nation. (I don't think you really understand the USA as much as you profess.)

I have no idea what crazy conspiracy theory you're on about....Same sex marriage?

[hristijan43]

ultra high definition in 720p you gotta be fucking kidding me right ?

[Richard Bussell]

In 2004 Venus was viewed crossing the lower part of the sun and in 2012 across the top. Did the camera flip over between the years, or does Venus have that much of a wave in it's orbit . . or is it us that has the wave in our orbit?

I miss school. :(

[peter paul]

so much thanks for sharing this

[fatarsemonkey]

It probably has some thing to do with the filters they are using, or it is a great glass sphere :)

[fatarsemonkey]

Oh yer I forgot they are moving closer and closer to a fascist government, all power in one man. But what most people can't see is who that one man really is because it is all disguised in merchant law. DC is a corporation. People fled Europe to get away from the tyranny of that style of power but it has all come back. Shame really.

/watch?v=7GrrcLVQF4k