Transit of Mercury, May 9th, 2016

Hannover 2016
equatorial view

Some of the participants our recent projects IYA2009 - Shape of the Earth and IYA2009 - Distance to the Moon and Transit of Venus 2012 and a group of German teachers will repeat the observations and measurements done during the transit of Venus trying to make the parallax of Mercury visible and - perhaps - to determine the distance to the sun.

Up to now, it is not planned to repeat the transit project of 2012 in detail. But it should be tried to bring interested people into contact. In the case of sufficient interest the data exchange pages of 2012 may be used.

People (pupils, teachers, amateurs and professional astronomers who are interested in systematically observing and evaluating the transit of Mercury should contact the editor of this page.

Introduction

The conditions of visibility will be very similar to those of the transits of Mercury in 2003 and of Venus in 2004.

The daylight side of the earth when the transit ...

... starts (11:10 UT)	... ends (18:45 UT)
The images show the locations of our actual participants.

The circumstances of the transit are described in detail by Fred Espanak. Local circumstances can be predicted by using the transit calculators of Xavier M. Jubier or J. Giesen.
The course of this transit (and other eclipses and transits) as seen from arbitrary locations on earth can be visualized with the Windows program Finsternisse or its English version Eclipses. The pictures below have been calculated with that program.

But the Mercury's parallax effect will be much smaller than that of Venus:


Hannover, Germany, 16:00 UT		Cape Town, South Africa, 16:00 UT		Parallax Hannover-Cape Town, 16:00 UT

The largest effect can perhaps simultaneously be observed from Helsinki, Finland, and Buenos Aires, Argentina:


Parallax Helsinki-Buenos Aires

Therefore, the taking of pictures simulateously must be planned very precisely (see the additional page below)!

The concrete schedule will be given later.

Other pages of this project:

Other sites dealing with this transit:

Editor:

Udo Backhaus

last update: last update: 2023-04-21