Well, unless you spent all of yesterday with your head in the same clouds that blocked my view (and it is half-term for many, so I don’t criticise a little R&R time), then you’ll almost certainly have seen the stunning image that my old colleague Joten Okamoto put together from the some of the Venus transit we got back from Hinode.
For those of you that hadn’t seen it, here you go!
(Credit: Joten Takenori Okamoto (Hinode SOT Team), NAOJ/JAXA)
Full disclosure: I’m the Project Scientist of another of Hinode’s three telescopes, the EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS). So I’m biased in liking this a lot.
Now, I can describe the bits of the image here in professional terms: you can see a wispy prominence poking out from the Sun’s edge, behind the upper-left part of Venus’ disc; there are slightly fuzzy spicules all along the edge of the Sun; you can see the refraction of the Sun’s light along the edge of Venus where it’s not on the Sun; and you can even see some stray light from optical imperfections on Venus’ disc showing up as faint bright light where the planet should show up as just black…
But I defy anyone not to find it beautiful.
I also have a hunch that – as well as being the most iconic image of the Venus transit – this may end up being one of the most iconic images of the whole Hinode mission!
Well done, universe and humans alike. Another win.
asubsetofdaves 