Space | Transit of Venus

Sometime last week, around June 5-6 2012, a very rare event occurred millions of miles in space - the transit of Venus, which is a rather fancy term for the planet Venus passing across the Sun.


Venus is our nearest planetary neighbor towards the Sun, and while we usually take its distance for granted it's actually so far off that its orbit actually passes the Sun from our point of view for periods of eight to more than a hundred years--the last time this happened was in 2004, and the next time it will happen again will be in 2117.

While the event was viewable in most parts of the world, our region was fortunate to have the entire transit visible. Unfortunately, I couldn't look directly at the sun, so I never actually saw it first-hand, which was a bummer.

NASA, however, took a lot of awesome photographs, mostly through their Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The photo above is my favorite, taken using extreme ultraviolet wavelengths that show the sheer massive scale of the Sun in relation to Venus, as well as its violent, swirling flares on its surface.


[Photo: NASA/SDO]