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Greatest Hits: The Year in Pictures

Greatest Hits: The Year in Pictures
Greatest Hits: The Year in Pictures On June 5 and 6, 2012, people all over the world watched as Venus passed in front of the Sun, but the best views were from spacecraft. This image is composed of fifteen photos of the event, taken through an extreme ultraviolet filter by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Venus is silhouetted against the solar corona, where ionized plasma reaches a temperature of a million degrees, radiating brightly in extreme ultraviolet light. The image has been rotated so that the Sun’s north pole is at left. NASA/GSFC/SDO