Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is
the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its
five-year mission, it will examine the sun's atmosphere, magnetic field
and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in
Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate. SDO provides images with
resolution 8 times better than high-definition television and returns
more than a terabyte of data each day.On June 5 2012, SDO
collected images of the rarest predictable solar event--the transit of
Venus across the face of the sun. This event lasted approximately 6
hours and happens in pairs eight years apart, which are separated from
each other by 105 or 121 years. The last transit was in 2004 and the
next will not happen until 2117.The videos and images
displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme
ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored
sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171
angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is
filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun,
which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.