Saturday, June 09, 2012

Transit of Venus

Astronomy Pic of the Day found: " This dramatic telephoto view across the Black Sea on June 6 finds Venus rising with the Sun, the planet in silhouette against a ruddy and ragged solar disk. Of course, the reddened light is due to scattering in planet Earth's atmosphere and the rare transit of Venus didn't influence the strangely shaped and distorted Sun."

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They also did a few others here and here.

The Big Picture has a great collection of photos:

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As did In Focus:

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And so did Universe Today:

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And if you really can't get enough, there's a flickr pool, NASA Venus Transit Observing Challenge

NASA has a space telescope designed specifically to study the Sun and not surprisingly it had the most spectacular view and they made a video. This is the Solar Dynamics Observatory's Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit. "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."



Astronaut Don Pettit watched the transit from the International Space Station.

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Perhaps most amazing is that Thierry Legault not only photographed the transit of Venus but also a transit of the Hubble Space Telescope at the same time. The HST took 0.97 seconds to cross the sun and Legault got nine shots of it. The HST is circled in this composite image:

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A friend of mine, the Honest Hypocrite brought a solarscope to Hawaii to watch the transit. He even made the paper.

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