Venus solar transit 2012 - Proba-2's journey across the Sun

This movie shows the transit of Venus on 5-6 June 2012 as seen from SWAP, a Belgian solar imager onboard ESA's PROBA2 microsatellite. SWAP, watching the Sun in EUV light, observes Venus as a small, black circle, obscuring the EUV light emitted from the solar outer atmosphere - the corona - from 19:45UT onwards. At 22:16UT - Venus started its transit of the solar disk

The bright dots all over the image ('snow storm') are energetic particles hitting the SWAP detector when PROBA2 crosses the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region where the protection of the Earth magnetic field against space radiation is known to be weaker.

Note also the small flaring activity in the bright active region in the northern solar hemisphere as Venus passes over. Towards the end, you can see a big dim inverted-U-shape moving away from the Sun towards the bottom-right corner. This is a coronal mass ejection taking off.

Credit: ESA/ROB

• Category

  Science & Technology

[WearTheWhiteRobe]

One reason I can think of is the movement of the satellite. The satellite is rotating around the Earth while keeping focus on the Sun. This would cause a sine wave like pattern to be observed for the path of the object between the satellite and the Sun (Venus of course in this case). I noticed that one "wave length" in the motion is less than two hours. So the question is: is the satellite rotating that fast around Earth? Less than two hours per rotation.

[luismaestontooo]

Yes. The satellite completes more than 14 orbits per day (less than 1 hour per orbit)

[Tom Baglee]

Go home Venus, you're drunk.

[xM4DM4X]

sorry to be that d bag :/

[luismaestontooo]

You are perfectly right. I takes about 1.7 h per orbit

[xM4DM4X]

That would mean we have less than 14 hours per day...

[James Fizerl]

looks like it is moving up and down..

[Cheryl Whitestone]

Check out the NASA transit, their image of Venus is translucent, you can see thru the dot at 0:24 check it out!

[Yaser Abd El Gawad]

A fantastic video. Unbelievable that such natural spectacles happen only once in hundret years.