Grab the kids, your telescope and some popcorn and head out on the deck, or out to the desert, or a country pasture, or perhaps even a planetarium. An infrequent astronomical sight — tiny Mercury inching across the surface of the sun – is set to place tomorrow afternoon in North America.
The only catch–you’ll need the right kind of telescope to see it. Astronomers say since Mercury is so tiny (1/194th the size of the sun) and looking directly at the sun is so dangerous to the eyes that viewing must be done with a properly outfitted telescope or online telescope cameras.
If you happen to have a properly filtered telescope experts say you can expect to see a small black dot against the face of the sun. If you don’t have the correct type of telescope you can check with your local planetarium to see if it is offering special viewing sessions. For example, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is one of many places hosting Mercury viewing parties. If you don’t live near a planetarium, several websites, including those from mountain peaks in Hawaii (Mauna Kea and Haleakala), will be showing Mercury’s trek online.
According to astronomers, Mercury will travel between the sun and Earth in a way that makes it appear to cross — in astronomy the word is “transit” — the bottom third of the sun from left to right. The last “transit of Mercury,” as it’s called, was in 2003.
Experts say, Mercury’s five-hour trek starts at 2:12 p.m. EST. People in Western time zones of the United States should be able to see the entire trip. Mercury is usually seen in the early evening, but it’s often obscured by buildings, city lights and trees. That’s why experts suggest if you have the correct type of telescope you should take a drive out to the desert or countryside for enhanced viewing.
According to NASA, the “transit of Mercury” only occurs about 13 times a century, with the next one happening in 2016. Though experts say, that’s more frequent than the transit of Venus, which happens in pairs, roughly twice in each century. The next one will occur in 2012.
Because of the timing of this year’s “transit of Mercury,” it will be visible in North and South America, Australia and Asia, but not in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and India, where it will be nighttime.
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