What looks
like a hovering string of pearls is actually the planet Mercury in timelapse as it
crosses the Sun.
Astronomers
used the space-based Solar and
Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) to assemble this view of Mercury’s Nov. 8,
2006 solar transit.
Click here to download a viewer's guide to Mercury's transit. |
The planet Mercury is only midway through
its transit in this view, obtained with SOHO’s Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI)
instrument. The timestamp sets the latest addition to this mosaic at about 3:57
p.m. EST (2057 GMT). The transit began at about 2:12 p.m. EST (1912 GMT) as the
leading limb of Mercury kissed the outer limb of the Sun.
Total
transit time was about four hours and 58 minutes, but don’t worry if you
missed. Unlike, Venus, which transits
the Sun twice every 125 years (the next one is June 6, 2012), Mercury’s
solar crossings occur a bit more frequently.
This year’s
Mercury transit marked the second of the 21st Century and will be
followed in about nine and a half years by another.
Planetary
transits across the Sun are an oddity of orbital dynamics, occurring when an
inner planet crosses the Sun in just the right plane to be noticeable from our
home planet Earth.
Return each weekday for a new SPACE.com Image of the Day.
| 
