Proba-2′s journey across the Sun

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This movie shows the transit of Venus on 5-6 June 2012 as seen from SWAP, a Belgian solar imager onboard ESA’s Proba-2 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 Proba-2 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.

Credits: ESA/ROB