On June 5-6 2012,
SDO is collecting images of one of the rarest predictable solar events:
tthe 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 last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until
2117. This image was captured on June 5, 2012.
During the transit
of Venus across the Sun's face on June 5-6, 2012, the Hubble Space
Telescope will be looking in the opposite direction -- at the Moon.
Hubble cannot look at the Sun directly, so astronomers are planning to
use the Moon as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the
small fraction of the light that passes through Venus's atmosphere.
Imprinted on that light are the fingerprints of the planet's atmospheric
makeup. This is an experiment to see how well Venus's atmosphere can be
studied spectroscopically, as a proxy for transit observations of
extrasolar planets.
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