Scientific Observations Planned for Monday's Transit of Mercury
Monday, May 9, 2016 - 11:31
in Astronomy & Space
The planet Mercury will cross the face of the Sun on Monday, May 9, and Williams College professor Jay Pasachoff will be observing it from the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. "At the 1999 transit of Mercury," Pasachoff reports, "Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona and I used spacecraft observations to show in detail how the merger of Mercury's edge and the Sun's edge appears. The dark silhouette of Mercury interacts with the unsharp edge of the Sun to give optical effects that hundreds of years ago for a similar event with Venus were confused with the discovery of Venus's atmosphere."