Planet Venus Fly By Awe Inspiring

Coming up early in the month, June 6th to be specific, I thought what to talk about today with the death of famed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury at age 91 in the news and also the anniversary of D-Day. But what took place on June 5th in front of the Sun with the transit of planet Venus across its surface to me was awe inspiring. Mainly from a size perspective as Venus the second planet from the sun is about the same size as Earth and the Sun seems so huge relative to it, and can make all of us feel very humble with our size in the vastness of the solar system and the universe. Then again we are GIANTS of our own compared to microscopic life or atomic particles. Something to ponder with how amazing nature is. Anyway here are some notes I found from that fly by and a very cool video to go along with it in case you were busy and didn't get your filtered glasses on to watch it or break out your telescope.

SDO's Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit

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.