Just days before the peak of the Leonid meteor shower [ http://www.arm.ac.u…], skywatchers were offered another astronomical treat as planet Mercury [ http://pds.jpl.nasa…] crossed the face of the Sun on November 15. Viewed from [ http://space.jpl.na…] planet Earth, a transit of Mercury [ http://sunearth.gsf…] is not all that rare. The last [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…] occurred in 1993 and the next will happen in 2003. Enjoying a mercurial transit does require an appropriately filtered telescope, still the event can be dramatic as the diminutive well-done [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…] world drifts past [ http://www2.astrono…Transit.html ] the dominating solar disk. This slow loading gif animation [ http://lambic.physi…] is based on images recorded by the earth-orbiting TRACE [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…] satellite. The false-color TRACE images [ http://canopy.lmsal…] were made in ultraviolet light and tend to show the hot gas just above the Sun's visible surface. Mercury's disk is silhouetted [ http://chippewa.nas…] against the seething plasma as it follows a trajectory near the edge of the Sun.
Explanation
Just days before the peak of the Leonid meteor shower [ http://www.arm.ac.u…], skywatchers were offered another astronomical treat as planet Mercury [ http://pds.jpl.nasa…] crossed the face of the Sun on November 15. Viewed from [ http://space.jpl.na…] planet Earth, a transit of Mercury [ http://sunearth.gsf…] is not all that rare. The last [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…] occurred in 1993 and the next will happen in 2003. Enjoying a mercurial transit does require an appropriately filtered telescope, still the event can be dramatic as the diminutive well-done [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…] world drifts past [ http://www2.astrono…Transit.html ] the dominating solar disk. This slow loading gif animation [ http://lambic.physi…] is based on images recorded by the earth-orbiting TRACE [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…] satellite. The false-color TRACE images [ http://canopy.lmsal…] were made in ultraviolet light and tend to show the hot gas just above the Sun's visible surface. Mercury's disk is silhouetted [ http://chippewa.nas…] against the seething plasma as it follows a trajectory near the edge of the Sun.
