Transit Viewing Questions:
1. Will I be able to see Venus with out a telescope?
2. Where is the best place for viewing the Transit of Venus?
3. How can I get involved with the Transit of Venus?
SDO Specific Questions:
1. What does NASA hope to understand/measure during the Transit of Venus this year?
2. How will this information be different to that collected in 2004?
3. Will SDO be studying solar dimming?
4. Will SDO be studying Venus' atmosphere?
Transit Viewing Questions:
1. Will I be able to see Venus with out a telescope?
First, it is never safe to look directly at the sun. For the transit of Venus it will be difficult but not impossible to see Venus with just your eyes and an approved safety filter. Venus is approximately 1 arcminute while the sun is approximately 30 arcminutes wide so Venus will be 1/30th the width of the sun which is very small and just inside the ability of the human eye to see. So people with good eyesight, may be able to see Venus using special solar viewing glasses, however it would be better to use a solar telescope for viewing the transit.
2. Where is the best place for viewing the Transit of Venus?
All or part of the transit will be visible from the ground throughout the world except for most of the countries in South America , Portugal and part of Spain and most of the countries in Western and southern Africa. For those viewers in countries in eastern Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East the transit will start during the night and be in progress as the sun comes up. For people in North and Central America the transit will start during the day and still be in progress as the sun sets. For the lucky people in Alaska and Hawaii, East Asia, Eastern Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific, they will get to see the entire transit. For information specific to your location please visit http://transitofvenus.nl/wp/where-when/local-transit-times/
3. How can I get involved with the Transit of Venus?
There are many way to be involved with all of the excitement around the transit.
- Host a viewing party- If you have a solar safe telescope invite your friends over to view the transit with you. You can make solar cookies
- Go to a local viewing event- find out about events in your area
- Watch the transit live online. Gather your friends around for activities and fun around the Venus Transit. You can watch live from anywhere in the world on NASA TV
- If you are an amateur astronomer with a solar telescope, contact a school or library in your community and see if they would like to host a viewing party and take your telescope there.
SDO Specific Questions:
1. What does NASA hope to understand/measure during the Transit of Venus this year?
The instruments on SDO will use the path of the transit to accurately orient our telescopes to solar north. We already know pretty well where the north pole of the Sun is but the motion of Venus across the disk gives us an independent measurement. We can also study how well the telescopes are working by watching how round the disk of Venus looks as it goes across the Sun.
2. How will this information be different to that collected in 2004? (How is SDO different to TRACE? Will a different part of Venus be on display? Any other differences?)
All solar telescopes need to know how to point to solar north. The information will be similar to that collected by Trace, but the newer instruments need calibration too.
SDO watches the whole Sun and will see the entire transit in all of the telescopes. Trace looked at small parts of the Sun and had to repoint the satellite to follow the Sun. I am looking forward to seeing if Venus goes over the limb at different times in the different wavelengths of SDO as it did in Trace.
Venus will be seen as a dark disk, without any details. (We don't see any of the surface features because the atmosphere is too thick.) That means we don't care what part of Venus faces the Earth.
3. Will SDO be studying solar dimming?
The EVE instrument looks at the Sun as a Star and may see the small decrease in the solar brightness as Venus crosses the disk. The change in brightness is only about 0.1% so seeing the dimming will be a challenge. The EVE measurement will be similar to those made by the Kepler satellite when it looks for transits of planets around other stars. However, solar dimming is usually associated with how much visible light reaches the surface of the Earth. While Kepler looks in those visible wavelengths EVE looks in very short extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.
4. Will SDO be studying Venus' atmosphere?
We have no planned studies but we will try to learn something about the atmosphere of Venus. The atmosphere of Venus will be only a pixel or two across in our images. This means the atmosphere is barely visible in the images. The atmosphere may be seen as a bright ring around Venus as it bends light around the planet.
