![]() These telescopes offered some solace to viewers across the midwestern and northeastern U.S., where overcast skies made it difficult for many eager transit-watchers to get a good view of the sun. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory also provided near-real-time views of the sun from space. Though the Mercury transit was not visible everywhere in the world - like Asia, Australia and Alaska, where it happened at night - anyone with an internet connection could still follow the event live online, thanks to astronomy webcast services like Slooh and the Virtual Telescope Project. To see the little fleck on the sun, observers had to use magnifying equipment with special solar filters it was too small to see with solar eclipse glasses.Ī view from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows Mercury approaching the sun's disk on Nov. In terms of area, the tiny planet covered only 0.003% of the sun's disk. With an apparent diameter of 10 arc seconds, Mercury's width was about 0.5% that of the sun. For Venus, transits occur in June and December.Īmateur astronomers and astrophotographers around the world took heed of today's rare celestial treat and ( weather permitting) captured some incredible images of Mercury as it inched across the sun like a tiny, traveling ink blot. In Mercury's case, this always happens in May or November. These transits happen because the planets' orbits are slightly tilted to the ecliptic, or the plane of Earth's orbit, and those orbits intersect at two places called "nodes." Transits occur when Earth crosses a node at the same time as the other planet. Venus last passed before the sun on June 6, 2012, and the next Venus transit isn't until Dec. ![]() Mercury and Venus are the only two planets that can transit the sun from Earth's perspective, because they are the only planets whose orbits are closer to the sun than Earth's.
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