High-rest transit of venus images

June 12, 2012 8:14 AM

Are the individual images of the transit of Venus in this NASA video available anywhere in high res?

One of them was available on the NASA Image of the Day page, which I cannot find right now (it seems I'm just not good at finding NASA images), but I preferred some of the images from later in the video.

posted by StephenF to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: Go here armed with the UTC from the bottom of the frame you like. Some are only available at 1024x1024 it seems rather than 2048x2048, like this one.
posted by edd at 8:42 AM on June 12, 2012

Best answer: There are easy and hard ways to do this. The easy way is to go select a time during the transit on Helioviewer and then under images select Observatory = SDO, Instrument & Detector = AIA, and Measurement = 171. This will load an image into the interface. You can then download the corresponding full resolution (4k x 4k) JPEG2000 file using the little image icon at the bottom of the panel where you selected your observation.

The more complicated way would be to use the Virtual Solar Observatory to download the original FITS files. (If you don't already know what a FITS file is, this is probably way more trouble than it is worth and you should use the first approach.)
posted by dseaton at 8:48 AM on June 12, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks guys!

edd, forgive my ignorance but I don't see how to use the UTC number on the page you linked. Could you clarify?

dseaton, I can get it the first way you suggested, many thanks.
posted by StephenF at 8:53 AM on June 12, 2012

Best answer: Sorry - the UTC is just the universal time given at the bottom of the images - it goes in the date field in the yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss format.
posted by edd at 9:24 AM on June 12, 2012