Transit of Venus: NASA's solar observatory releases montage of their favourite images from yesterday's rare event
By Eddie Wrenn
Yesterday's transit of Venus was a rare event - one which was observed by tens of thousands of people across the planet.
In space, other eyes were watching - those of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which has now spent just over two years watching and studying the sun.
Now the observatory has put together a selection of its best photographs in video form - overlaid with classical music - to share some wonders of the cosmic ballet.
See video here:
Across the face of the sun: Yesterdays transit is technically an eclipse, and would have reduced the amount of light reaching our planet
Venus leaves the face of the sun for another 105 years - - but NASA nearly missed parts of the show because of a computer error
This image is from a join NASA/Japan satellite called Hinode, showing Venus beginning to leave its transit
Venus travels across the face of the sun - as viewed from Earth - in pairs eight years apart, followed by a gap of 105 years. It will not be seen again until 2117.
Venus and Earth are on slightly different orbital panes to each other, meaning that even on those occasions when the Earth, Venus and the sun line up - every 1.6 years or so, Venus is above or below the sun from our viewpoint, and the transit - technically an eclipse - does not occur.
Launched on Feburary 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun.
Filtered by NASA, the Solar Dynamics Observatory's images also show the vast plumes of flame flying out out from the sun's surface
The scale of the photography is quite incredible: There is 67million miles of space between the sun and Venus
During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun's atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate.
SDO provides images with resolution eight times better than high-definition television and returns more than a terabyte of data each day - it is responsible for some of the vivid images of Venus crossing a deep-red sun from yesterday's event.
The videos and images displayed in the video above are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum.
Across the world, stargazers looked up: One person watches the sun set over the Great Salt Lake outside Salt Lake City, Utah, June 5, 2012