Correcting the SOHO part of the 8.7.11 video

The reason Venus isn't traveling in a stright line, but is actually rising in the SOHO images, can be a bit tricky to understand.

The key part is to know (or google :) that Venus' orbit is inclined a bit over 3° when compared to the earths. This means that when we're looking at it's orbit it will sometimes rise and sometimes dip. This is also complicated some more by the fact that Venus and the earth are orbiting around the sun at different speeds so we keep seeing changing angles.

The image below is made by superimposing three SOHO images from 2000, showing the entering, "centering" and exiting of Venus and as we can see, it did rise a bit even back then (the white dots below the line are Jupiter and Saturn from the oldest image) :

As we can see in this superimposed image from a simulation of July 19 and Aug 8 at the gunn site, the angle Venus is traveling in today fits the acctual SOHO superimposition at the bottom very well :

For each image above I rotated the view to keep earth in the middle of the sun

So we can see that it shrinks like Venus and travels like Venus.
That can only mean one thing - It's a duck!