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Stunning footage of Venus captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory

(CBS News) Space. The final frontier. And for those who might not know, yesterday that frontier gave an amazing view of Venus. Don't worry if you missed it, you'll just have to wait another 105 years. 

What's that you say?  You can't wait that long?  Ohhhhh, I see, live that long is what you mean.  Yeah, you're probably right.  I do have another option for you, though: this amazing footage captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). I'd recommend watching it in high-definition.

The spectacular space perspective was posted by NASA Goddard who writes about it:

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 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.

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.

Just absolutely stunning to behold! Thanks go out from all of us here at The Feed to NASA Goddard for making this video possible!
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