Science Art: Transit of Venus in 2012.

9 June 2025 grant Featured, Science Art 0

Scientific illustration of Venus transiting in front of the Sun, as captured by the Solar Dynamics Observetory satellite, a flaming metallic orb girdled by a series of perfectly circular silhouettes making a diagonal line from the upper left to the middle right of the image.
Scientific illustration of Venus transiting in front of the Sun, as captured by the Solar Dynamics Observetory satellite, a flaming metallic orb girdled by a series of perfectly circular silhouettes making a diagonal line from the upper left to the middle right of the image.

This is Venus, moving in front of the Sun. Technically, I suppose it’s a lot of Venuses, or a chain of a lot of pictures of Venus.

It was made by NASA/SDO, AIA, or NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory developed at the Goddard Space Center.

Here’s the description from Wikimedia Commons, where I found the image:

This image shows a sequence of photographs by NASA’s SDO spacecraft, taken in the extreme ultraviolet spectrum (171 Angstroms), and stitched together to show Venus’s path across the face of the Sun. On June 5-6 2012, SDO collected images of one of the rarest predictable solar events: the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. The previous transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.