Movies from the Venus transit 2004

These movies are made from images acquired with the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope on La Palma, which belongs to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. They were taken at a wavelength of 705 nm which corresponds to deep red light.

Please be sure to include proper credit if using these movies. Observer: Dan Kiselman from the Institute for Solar Physics.

Silhouette

Venus is seen moving against the background of the solar disk. The speckled pattern on the sun is granulation, an effect of convective motions. The movie covers the time interval of 07:44 to 07:57 UT on 8 June 2004.

mpg (0.7 Mbytes) To play this movie with e.g. mplayer you may wish to specify the aspect ratio to 444:400.
animated gif (25.5 Mbytes)
jpegs (~75 Kbytes/frame) These jpegs have higher resolution than the gif and mpg versions.
tar (9.5 Mbytes) The jpegs in a tar archive..

Egress

This movie shows the egress of Venus from the solar disk. The shivering and occasional fuzziness is due to turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere - what astronomers call 'seeing'. Note the moment of bad seeing around frame 1713. You can see a hint of the notorious 'black drop' effect that confused the observers trying to time the contact during the earlier transits. By frame 1728 the seeing is better again and 3rd contact is close to frame 1730. (The frame numbers correspond to the jpeg file numbers.)

mpg (3.4 Mbytes). To play this movie with e.g. mplayer you may wish to specify the aspect ratio to 606:546.
animated gif (206 Mbytes). Large file! Use this only if you can't make the mpg version work.
jpegs (~10 Kbytes/frame).
tar (9.7 Mbytes). The jpegs in a tar archive..

Ring

This is a close up of a detail of the EGRESS movie. The image contrast has been changed to show the elusive aureole outlining the disk of Venus. It is caused by sunlight being refracted towards us in the atmosphere of the planet. It has been described by some historical observers, though the reports are mixed with spurious light effects caused by imagination or inferior telescopes. Also here one notices the shivering due to 'seeing'.

mpg (0.8 Mbytes). To play this movie with e.g. mplayer you may wish to specify the aspect ratio to 700:250.
animated gif (28.5 Mbytes).
jpegs (~12 Kbytes/frame).
tar (1.9 Mbytes). The jpegs in a tar archive.

Time-stamp: <2013-04-19 11:17:30 mats>