|
Mercury Transit November 8, 2006 Watch here for details and updates as the club prepares for the event. We will be setting up at the Roswell Museum's main entrance and begin viewing about noon. If you can't be there, try watching it on the web at SOHO.
FOR VIEWERS IN THE CARLSBAD, NM AREA FROM: Kathryn Jones, Living Desert State Park November 1, 2006 LIVING DESERT ZOO & GARDENS STATE PARK PUBLIC TELESCOPE VIEWING SET FOR TRANSIT OF MERCURY ACROSS THE SUN
Mercury will transit, or move across the face of the Sun on Wednesday, November 8th. Since transits of Mercury occur only about 13 times each century and visibility depends on location, this is a rare occurrence. The public will be able to watch this event safely through a large telescope with special solar filters provided by Living Desert State Park volunteer Jerry Krause. Weather permitting, the telescope will be set up on Wednesday, Nov. 8th from 12 noon until 5:00 p.m. next to the Science Building at Carlsbad High School. Principal Tom Quintela gave his approval to open the campus to the public for this special event because of a partnership between Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park and high school science teacher Bev Bierle. For more information, call Bev Bierle at 234-3319. Contact person: Kathryn Jones, Interpretive Ranger, 505-887-5516
|
|
THE
NOVEMBER 8 TRANSIT OF MERCURY, excerpted from an article by Alan
MacRobert in Sky & Telescope magazine
Remember when the big black disk of Venus crossed the Sun on
June 8, 2004? We're about to get a miniature version of the
same phenomenon on November 8 when it's Mercury's turn to
transit the Sun's face. Mercury will take nearly 5 hours to
cross the Sun from the viewpoint of our moving Earth.
Skywatchers in New Mexico can catch most of the transit during
the afternoon before the Sun sets. Mercury will appear quite
small - only 8 arc-seconds in diameter compared to 58
arc-seconds for Venus during the 2004 event. Nevertheless,
Mercury is big enough that in a safely filtered telescope the
total blackness of its silhouette can be distinguished from the
dark gray of any sunspot umbras that may be present.
The
transit begins at first contact around 12:12 PM MST on
Thursday 11/8. This is when Mercury's leading edge first
touches the Sun's southeastern limb. The actual time will vary
by a couple minutes depending on where on Earth you are looking
from. Second contact, when Mercury's trailing edge
enters the Sun's disk, comes slightly less than 2 minutes
later. Deepest transit occurs around 2:41 PM MST. The transit
ends around 5:08 PM MST on 11/8. That will be very near sunset,
but if the Sun is still up where you are, look for third
and fourth contacts to unwind in reverse order - a
mirror image of the first and second.
Hope for good weather! The last transit of Mercury happened May
7, 2003, but the next doesn't come until May 19, 2016.
(The next transit of Venus is June 6, 2012, starting in the
afternoon for North America.)
Be Sun-safe! You can burn a permanent blind
spot onto your retina by trying to observe the Sun without
proper protection. You'll need a safe solar filter over the
front of your telescope - or you can project the Sun's
image out of the eyepiece of a telescope or a pair of binoculars
onto a white sheet of paper.
|
