Sky watchers gathered across the
country Tuesday to witness the planet Venus floating across the face of
the sun—but chances are they didn't see it like this.
The best seats in the house
belonged to NASA, which captured images from its own high-tech
spacecraft. The Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced
spacecraft ever designed to study the sun, and it provides images with a
resolution eight times better than high-definition television, according to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Tiny Venus passes by a massive, fiery, glowing orb. The
images were constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet
light and a portion of the visible spectrum, making the sun appear in
different colors: red, gold, magenta and orange.
The event isn't expected to happen again in our lifetime. The last transit was in 2004 and the next won't happen until 2117.
Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the
SDO is on a five-year mission to examine the sun's atmosphere and
magnetic field and to provide a better understanding of the role the sun
plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate.
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