Venus solar transit 2012 – Proba-2’s journey across the Sun
This movie shows the transit of Venus on 5-6 June 2012 as seen from SWAP, a Belgian solar imager onboard ESA’s PROBA2 microsatellite. SWAP, watching the Sun in EUV light, observes Venus as a small, black circle, obscuring the EUV light emitted from the solar outer atmosphere – the corona – from 19:45UT onwards. At 22:16UT – Venus started its transit of the solar disk
The bright dots all over the image (‘snow storm’) are energetic particles hitting the SWAP detector when PROBA2 crosses the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region where the protection of the Earth magnetic field against space radiation is known to be weaker.
Note also the small flaring activity in the bright active region in the northern solar hemisphere as Venus passes over. Towards the end, you can see a big dim inverted-U-shape moving away from the Sun towards the bottom-right corner. This is a coronal mass ejection taking off.
Credit: ESA/ROB
The movement of proba-2 on its orbit changes the viewing angle over the Sun only negligibly, but it does change the apparent location of Venus over the Sun disc, far behind Venus.
because we orbit the sun?
Watching the 720p video I can see some other black dots that apear in some consecutive frames and seem to be moving… what are those?
venus is 95% the earth's diameter…it's insane when you look at its size compared to our Sun!
24 hours / 14 orbits > 1 hour/orbit ?
This isn't a NASA video. It'a European. Look what channel you're watching. And reading the comments is a good advise 🙂 The answer is given in comments multiple times. This satellite is moving fast around the earth and the perspective from telescope changes quickly.
Check out the NASA transit, their image of Venus is translucent, you can see thru the dot at 0:24 check it out!
looks like it is moving up and down..
Go home Venus, you're drunk.
For those who want to know why Venus appears to oscillate up and down and change speeds, I have given illustrations and an explanation in this Photobucket picture:
http://s813.photobucket.com/user/astrobrant2/media/Venus%20Transit%20Wobble_zpsvov0kv3y.jpg.html?sort=3&o=0
Click the magnifier icon to enlarge.
That doesn't look like a Venus transit. It is wobbleing threw the orbit like outer planets do? Why?
animace