Transit of Mercury

Mercury Transit May 2003

The Sun is really huge, he has captured 99.86% of the total mass of dust and gas of the original nebula.
You see the planet Mercury on the image above cons?
The tiny disk of Mercury, the planet nearest the sun, crossed the enormous solar disk, 7 May 2003 for 5 hours. Mercury has a diameter of 4 880 km and yet it is insignificant to the gigantic solar disk.
The sun was above the horizon throughout the transit of Mercury for observers from Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia and this has not posed a problem for the SOHO spacecraft watching the Sun.
Hardly visible under the aspect of a small dark spot, Mercury progresses from left to right on four camera images in EUV from SOHO.
The false colors of the images correspond to different wavelengths in the extreme ultraviolet.

On the enlarged image, try to see the small task revealing the presence of Mercury.
On the green zone, it is in the upper left, a little above the solar surface.
The first yellow zone, it is always on the same line, but in the first third of the image.
The second yellow zone, it is always on the same line, but in the last third of the image.
On the blue area, she is always on the same line, but at the limit of the curvature of the Sun.
This transit of Mercury is the first of 14 transits taking place during the twenty-first century.

Image: First transit of the century, of Mercury across the Sun. Image Credit: SOHO - EIT Consortium, NASA