Mercury transit photos

Mercury transit photos

Attached are images of Mercury just beginning its transit of the sun soon after 08:12 this morning. They were taken with a telescope at the University of Canterbury's Mt John Observatory, Lake Tekapo.

The pictures show Mercury as a tiny round dot, edging onto the sun. The large object below it, in these photos, is a sunspot: a cool region on the sun's surface.

The Mercury disk is very small with a diameter around 1/200th of the sun's disk. So on an 8-inch, 200-mm image of the sun Mercury appears 1 mm across.

Photos by Alan Gilmore and Pam Kilmartin.

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Websites for viewing the transit on are

http://gong.nso.edu/mercury_transit06/

www.exploratorium.edu/transit

http://astroday.net/MercTransit06.html

ENDS

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