I don’t have any welder’s goggles, so could not see Venus crossing the disc of the sun, although I did look up several times while enjoying the sparkling day here in the upper midwest.
Here’s NASA’s video of what I missed. Worth a few minutes of your time. And, oh yeah, DO go full screen.
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.
I viewed the whole thing live online. It’s extremely cool to see another planet orbiting the same sun as ours.
Not just another planet but the nearest planet to ours, the brightest planet -Venus is also the Evening and Morning Star & a twin of Earth in terms of mass and size albeit very alien and hostile conditions. A very brilliant lesson on the astronomical magnitude of the results of a runaway greenhouse effect. Venus was probably Earth-like with oceans and maybe life once, a billion or two years ago. Now it is a fascinating, strange and extremely hostile world where you’d be simultanously crushed, roasted and corroded to death in about a nanosecond.
How it became the hell it is today is what, I gather, inspired a certain Jim Hansen to start studying and contemplating the planetary overheating due to Co2 issue.
Cool stuff! Here in the Denver area, (Boulder) we have the Space Weather Prediction center, where you can link to any number of sites that have solar images. http://www.swpc.noaa.gov.
I know this isn’t nearly as cool, but you might enjoy my “Man on the Sun”:
http://sterlingstarling.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/man-on-the-sun/
I really enjoyed photographing the event while I could–before a cloud “swallowed” the sun–and then watching the rest via online streaming. I missed the 2004 transit, so I’m really glad I planned ahead for this one.
(And you should get yourself a cheap pair of “eclipse glasses” for future sun viewing. I was able to enjoy both the recent annular eclipse and the transit of Venus, and they were only about $2 a pair.)
I missed it as well. Too cloudy outside during the evenings after work to see it. Nevertheless, I have some astronomy software that shows what it would have looked like from my area. Oh, and these wonderful videos from NASA. Thanks for sharing.
Saw the 2012 Cytherean* transit through eclipse glasses – and projection onto a card and a view through a number of telescopes along with a whole lot of amatuer astronomers and members of the public in Adelaide South Australia.
Love that video – cheers! 🙂
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* Cytherean alternative for Venusean along the lines of Arean for Mars and Terran for Earth – derived from the island of Cytheria (now called Cerigo) on whose shores Venus supposedly emerged.