260-NASA – SDO’s Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit

“NASA’s project scientist for SDO likes to call this the trebuchet prominence, after the Medieval catapult that flung material during battle. This image was captured on February 24, 2011, when a moderate-sized solar flare occurred near the edge of the sun. Simultaneously, the sun blew out this gorgeous, waving mass of erupting plasma that swirled and twisted over a 90-minute period Photo: NASA/SDO.

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.

An overlaid composite image of the 100 millionth photo taken by AIA Telescopes, showing the sun in multiple wavelengths. Photo: NASA/SDO.

Photo of the integrated SDO spacecraft (image credit: NASA)