Hubble image archive
Hubble Shoots The Moon During Venus Transit
During the transit of Venus across the Sun's face on June 5-6, 2012, the Hubble Space Telescope will be looking in the opposite direction – at the Moon. Hubble cannot look at the Sun directly, so astronomers are planning to use the Moon as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight a...
- Date
- Jan 1, 2012
- Mission
- Hubble Space Telescope
- Archive ID
- hubblesite-images-2012-22-3044-image
During the transit of Venus across the Sun's face on June 5-6, 2012, the Hubble Space Telescope will be looking in the opposite direction – at the Moon. Hubble cannot look at the Sun directly, so astronomers are planning to use the Moon as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the light that passes through Venus's atmosphere. Imprinted on that light are the fingerprints of the planet's atmospheric makeup. This is an experiment to see how well Venus's atmosphere can be studied spectroscopically, as a proxy for transit observations of extrasolar planets.
Credits
NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)More Images From This Period
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Source
Image and source material are credited to the official mission archive linked below.
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