Thursday, May 08, 2003

IMAGES OF THE WEEK





Three images of the planet Mercury, in transit across the face of the Sun.

A "transit", in astronomical terms, is when one object crosses in front of another. The most famous examples of transits are the eclipses, when the Moon transits with the Sun. Planetary transits are more rare, given the extra considerations of orbital positioning of the planets with respect to the Sun, their positions in the plane of the ecliptic, and so forth. But recently Mercury had a transit, and these images were captured during the rare event. In the second image, Mercury is the circled dot; that other dot is actually a sunspot.

BONUS IMAGE OF THE WEEK

I found the link for the main IOTW on Warren Ellis's blog yesterday. And I also found this little item of weirdness, which I just had to reproduce:



For just sheer oddity, you can't beat Warren Ellis.

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