Did you miss seeing Mercury transit the sun? Don’t worry, it’ll happen again in May 2049

Scott G Winterton, Deseret News

Shauntel Cheney and her children, Annabelle, Lou and Jess, watch as Mercury passes across the sun during a viewing event at the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City on Monday. When Mercury crosses directly between the Earth and the sun, viewers can see the oft-called “Swift Planet” as a tiny black dot traversing the disk of the sun. Transits of Mercury occur in either May or November — about 13 times every century — and the last such event was May 9, 2016. The next transit will not happen again until Nov. 13, 2032. However, it won’t be visible from the U.S. again until May 7, 2049. Mercury can sometimes be seen with the naked eye near dawn or dusk. However, most of the time it is obscured by the sun’s glare. “This event may seem rather unremarkable. However, figuring out how to calculate the motion of solar system bodies in order to predict such events was a very important accomplishment in the history of astronomy,” Robert Bigelow, the planetarium’s longtime education program specialist, said in a statement. “Mercury is a remarkable planet,” he said, adding, “It’s the smallest planet and orbits the sun more quickly than any other planet in the solar system — only 88 days compared to our 365 days. However, Mercury spins so slowly on its axis, that one day on Mercury is 176 days long.”

from Deseret News https://ift.tt/2KdrqQV