[Chaos-l] Fwd: Video and Photos Capture Transit of Venus From Space

[walter fowler]

My astronomically minded (and Web-savvy) nephew sent me this collection of
transit pix.  One of the photos may be showing an airplane releasing the
"weather balloon/UFOs" that could be proving the point (but that's
speculative).  Walter

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: odysseus <george.kachergis at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 3:27 PM
Subject: Video and Photos Capture Transit of Venus From Space
To: walter fowler <walterfowler at gmail.com>




Sent to you by odysseus via Google Reader:


Video and Photos Capture Transit of Venus From
Space<http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wiredscience/~3/Hr972j9vMaE/>
via Wired: Wired Science <http://www.wired.com/wiredscience> by Adam Mann
on 6/6/12



While millions of earthbound viewers tuned in to see the Transit of Venus,
some celestial observation points topped them all. The video above captures
the historic event from more than 22,000 miles above our planet, taken by
NASA’s Solar Dynamics
Observatory<http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/overview/index.html>from
geosynchronous orbit.

The high-above and high-definition view shows our sister planet
Venus<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/ways-to-watch-transit-venus/>as
it plunges just past the solar limb and crosses the sun’s face. The
video is composed of a series of images stitched together to produce a
sped-up version of the transit (which, in reality, took nearly seven
hours). SDO took images in several different wavelengths, including extreme
ultraviolet that shows the sun blazing with fierce magnetic field lines.

<http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/06/Venus-TransitSDO.jpg>

Venus looks like it’s going to get burned above a hellish landscape as it
sails across the sun’s face — it’s more than 67 million miles away so
there’s no actual chance of that. This is the first time that a satellite
has taken such high-quality images of a transit of Venus. The SDO data may
help scientists learn details of the Venusian
atmosphere<http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/04jun_arcofvenus/>
.

Slightly closer to home, astronaut Don Pettit snapped some incredible
photographs (such as the one below) of the transit from the International
Space Station, which sits in low-Earth orbit about 240 miles above the
planet’s surface. Knowing that his rotation aboard the ISS would overlap
with the historic event, Pettit packed special lenses for his camera. His
photos<http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa_jsc_photo/sets/72157629649730820/with/7158352677/>represent
the first images of a Venus transit taken from the space station.

<http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/06/venustransitpettit.jpg>

One more incredible image comes from the Johnson Space Center in Texas,
where NASA photographer Mark Sowa captured the sun with beauty mark Venus
setting behind the Mercury-Redstone
rocket<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_Launch_Vehicle>,
the U.S.’s first manned launch vehicle (below). More amazing photos of the
transit are available in this user-submitted
gallery<http://spaceweather.com/gallery/>from Spaceweather.com.

<http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/06/venustransitmercury.jpg>

*Update*: One of our readers, Austin Kurtz, has sent a great photo of the
transit <http://wotog.com/personal/transit-of-venus-2012/> taken from
Chicago. The flight path of O’Hare International Airport was between Kurtz
and the sun, leading to an incredible airplane silhouette alongside Venus
crossing the sun.

<http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/06/AKurtz_VenusTransit_20120605_4628_UnwatermarkedForWired.jpg>

*Video: NASA/SDO<http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=145648241>
*

*Images: 1) NASA/SDO<http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/multimedia/gallery/venus-transit-2012-first.html>.
2) NASA/Don Pettit<http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa_jsc_photo/7159736253/in/photostream>.
3) NASA/Mark Sowa<http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa_jsc_photo/7344965262/in/photostream>.
4) Austin Kurtz <http://wotog.com/>*

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