June 6, 2012

The Venus Movies

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

As a final hurrah for the 2012 Venus transit of the Sun, here are some beautiful time-lapse movies from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory; an orbiting telescope that can image the Sun in a variety of narrow wavebands, from visible light to ultraviolet and extreme-ultraviolet, probing the different temperature structures at the solar surface.

First up, the ingress of Venus in the 30.4 nanometer waveband - viewing the solar chromosphere and transition region at temperatures of around 50,000 Kelvin:

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Next, the full transit in the 17.1 nanometer band - viewing the 'quiet' corona and upper transition region at temperatures of around 630,000 Kelvin:

Here we have ingress again, in the 19.3 nanometer band, probing the corona and hot flare structure at about 1.2 to 20 million Kelvin:

And finally, the last view of Venus in transit for more than the next 100 years, egress at 17.1 nanometers, probing the 630,000 Kelvin temperature structures:

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