Sic Transit Gloria Monday
I can never resist a terrible pun, so thought this would be an especially good day to post this video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, showing views of last week’s Transit of Venus taken at several different wavelengths..
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In the Dark 
June 13, 2012 at 9:18 am
They might have chosen better music; the start sounded like an inferior ripoff of Tubular Bells. Better still would have been Pink Floyd’s “Set the controls for the heart of the sun” (which, incidentally, was the best-ever title of a scientific paper, about a controlled nuclear fusion experiment).
Dpoes the sun appear more dynamic at differing wevalengths or is it an optical illusion?
June 13, 2012 at 12:10 pm
I always mute the sound when I watch such things; the music is always terrible.
Different wavelengths emerge from different depths within the Sun’s atmosphere so you see different layers in the different bands. The outer part of the sun supports large convective motions driven by turbulence with very complicated dynamics that vary considerable with height in the atmosphere…
June 13, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Thank you. I remember being asked by one physicist back in the 1980s whether chaos theory, beautiful as it undoubtedly was, had any physical applications. I was able to reply that the number of hexagonal convection cells here increased in number with certain physical parameters at transitions governed by chaotic dynamics.