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 lasted approximately 6 hours and happens in pairs eight years apart, which 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 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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| HMI Continuum. Portion of visible spectrum. The transit of Venus is just begun (maximum detail). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| HMI Continuum. Portion of visible spectrum. The transit of Venus is just begun. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| HMI Continuum. Portion of visible spectrum. The transit of Venus is just begun (total view). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| HMI Continuum. Portion of visible spectrum. Almost gone... Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| Sequence of 171 angstrom images composited together to show the path of Venus. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 171 angstrom image before the transit. Venus at the upper left (detail). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 171 angstrom image before the transit (half disk view). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 171 angstrom image at mid-transit (detail). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 171 angstrom image at mid-transit (full wiew). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 171 angstrom image. Egress begins (detail). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 171 angstrom image. Egress begins (full disk view). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 193 angstrom image showing Venus completely off the limb and backlit by only the corona. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 304 angstrom image. The transit is just begun (maximum detail). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 304 angstrom image. The transit is just begun. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 304 angstrom image. The transit is just begun (full disk view). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 304 angstrom image at mid-transit (detail). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 304 angstrom image at mid-transit (full disk view). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 304 angstrom image. Egress begins (detail). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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| 304 angstrom image. Egress begins (full disk view). Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO |
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