Transit of Mercury

On May 9, 2016, the planet Mercury will transit across the face of the Sun and for most of the Earth, the transit will be visible (or at least portions of it).


The transit begins at 11:12 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time measured at Greenwich, England) and ends at 18:42 UTC. To determine your time offset from UTC, Wikipedia has a good summary. For example, in Pittsburgh (where I live), we are currently only four hours behind UTC due to daylight savings time. So in Pittsburgh, the transit begins at 7:12 AM and ends at 2:42 PM.


To see the transit, you should not look directly at the Sun.. There are a couple of ways to look at it, however.

1. Have a Sun filter for a telescope, binoculars, or camera.
2. Watch it online at NASA.gov.

If you recall (or even if you don't), a transit is similar to an eclipse and an occultation. A transit is when a planet crosses in front of its parent star as seen from Earth. On Earth, only Mercury and Venus can transit the Sun. Unfortunately, many of us alive today will never witness another transit of Venus, as the last two took place in June of 2004 and June of 2012. The next transit of Venus will not take place until December of 2117. Mercury has a much shorter period of transits, approximately every three years, so if you miss this transit, you will only have to wait until November 2019.