Mercury will transit in front of the disk of the sun on Wednesday. It’s kind of a cool thing to witness (only happens about 12 times a century) if you have the right equipment. Back in 1999, I captured about an hour of video of the transit that that year and created the animated GIF that you see on the right. This transit looks like it will cross the disk much closer to the middle, and should be more impressive. At the moment however, skies are not looking favorable for the San Francisco area, but I’m dusting off some equipment that I haven’t used in a while in some hope that I’ll get lucky. We’ll see.
[tags]Astronomy,Mercury,Transit[/tags]
Addendum: The San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers have a nifty page on the transit, which was brought to my attention by Phil Plait over on the Bad Astronomy blog.