Transit of Mercury
There will be a visible transit of Mercury
across the disk of the Sun in the Washington DC Metro area on
Wednesday, November 8, 2006 a little after 2:00 PM until sunset (
around 5:00 PM), which we will view because of the rain and clouds on
the Internet from the Planetarium,
going to some place that it is clear, at the Takoma Park/Silver Spring
campus of Montgomery
College. See Fred Espenak, NASA/GSFC, transit of Mercury pages at
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/OH/transit06.html.
There will not be another transit of Mercury
across the disk of the Sun until May 9, 2016. The previous
transit of Mercury was on May 7, 2003. There are approximately 13
Mercury transits per century. Telescopes with solar filters will
be pointed at the sun to view any sunspots and the transit form 2:00 PM
until sunset. Mercury will have an angular diameter of 9.95
arcsec; the Sun will have an angular diameter of 31 arcmin and 17
arcsec. This means that Mercury will be 0.005 times smaller than
the sun in angular diameter. First contact is at 2:12 PM, and
second contact (when the whole planet covers a small part of the Sun)
occurs at 2:14 PM. The greatest transit occurs at 4:41 PM, but
the Sun will be only approximately 3 deg above the horizon
(compensating for refraction of the atmosphere) and may be behind a
building.
If it is cloudy we will still hold the event,
but we will view the event from the first floor of the parking garage
instead of the roof of the parking garage. This will be possible
with a computer with an internet connection to a telescope further
west, where it will be clear, a video projector, and a screen. In
the summer of 2004 when the transit of Venus occurred a similar set up
was available, but good weather that morning made it unnecessary.
Internet Transit of Mercury sites:
Nasa Digital
Learning Network
Exploritorium
Transit in San Francisco
Hawaiian
Webcast of the Transit
Space Weather
Kochi, Japan
Montgomery
College's planetarium
Last changed 4:29PM November 16, 2006