Did you miss the transit of Venus?

If you missed the transit of Venus this morning (like me), then there are some great movies taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Click here to watch video taken by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, on board the SDO. The movie shows the Sun in the X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum (at 171 angstrom), at around 1 million degrees. The video shows Venus passing in front of the solar corona – a region heated by the huge and complex magnetic field at the surface of the Sun. For the chemists amongst you, the 171 angstrom spectral line is from Fe IX – eight times ionised Iron.

Observations of the transit of Venus, allow us to calculate a more accurate value of the distance from the Sun to the Earth – also called 1 Astronomical Unit (AU). More details of how this is done can be found in our news item from May here.

Tom Lyons, ESERO-UK Teacher Fellow