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.
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NASA Videos