The winner picture of the Venus transit must be the one below, whose original version can be found here. Thanks Bente Lilya Bye for posting the link on her Facebook page!



The picture was taken by Hinode, a joint JAXA-NASA mission to study the Sun's magnetism in and around sunspots.

Well, so as predicted Venus passed over the disk of our Sun yesterday (this morning, if you live in Europe), and it produced quite a show, as many pictures and videos available around testify. To make the view more pleasing, our Sun was showing a discrete amount of solar spots, betraying the fact that we are approaching Solar Max (there is a 11-year cycle of solar activity, which manifests itself visually with black spots appearing on the disk, and on the Earth with auroras and electromagnetic disturbances).

In case you want a quick link to a nice slideshow showing Venus crossing the Sun's disk in a set of some thirty images, please visit this flicker site.

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