Venus Transit 2012 Composited Visuals

  • Released Monday, June 11, 2012
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These visualizations were generated by compositing the small field-of-view, high-cadence closeups of Venus with the full-disk, low-cadence imagery from Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Two different instruments are used: the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) which sees light in the visible range, and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) which sees light in several wavelengths in the ultraviolet range. To find out more information about these instruments, check out The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly Tutorial.

Some artifacts may be visible from the compositing, but you have to look pretty closely to see them.

The color table threshold was raised for these images, reducing the amount of noise visible in the images.

Note: There is an interesting artifact worthy of mention and clarification, and that is as Venus crosses the solar limb, the limb appears to be visible through the planet in some of the imagers (most notably the ultraviolet channels). Discussion with the scientists who built the imagers suggest this might be 'crosstalk' between the readouts of the four CCD panels that make up a complete image. It is an artifact of the imaging system.

A high-cadence view of Venus Transit in AIA 171 angstroms.

A high-cadence view of Venus Transit in HMI.

A high-cadence view of Venus Transit in AIA at 304 angstroms

These are composited Full Disk frames, constructed by compositing the HMI high-cadence inset with the low cadence full-resolution disk.

These are composited Full Disk frames, constructed by compositing the AIA 171 high-cadence inset with the low cadence full-resolution disk.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Monday, June 11, 2012.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 12:02 AM EST.

Missions

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Series

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Datasets used in this visualization

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.