Mercury Transit

Mercury past in front of the sun on Monday morning this week. My husband set his camera on a tripod with a solar filter in our driveway and got one reasonable picture before the haze became thick clouds over the whole of central Maryland where we live. The small dot to the bottom of the disk is Mercury; the upper one is a sunspot.

My daughter had better luck in Tucson. The transit was already underway before the sun came up but it was a clear, sunny day. The transit lasted until about 11:30 AM local time. She had organized an event on the mall at the University of Arizona – complete with solar telescopes and a scale model of the solar system. When I talked to her later in the day she said they had several 100 people stop by to take a look through the telescopes and understand what was happening….and how it relates to the way exoplanets are discovered! She spent 2+ hours in the sun talking to people – sharing sunscreen with the other volunteers.