A Few Stories About the Transit of Mercury on Monday

On May 9, 2016, Mercury passed directly between the Sun and Earth, making a transit of the Sun. Mercury transits happen about 13 times each century. NASA’s SDO studies the sun 24/7 and captured the entire nine-hour event. This composite image of Mercury’s journey across the Sun was created with visible-light images from HMI on SDO. Image courtesy of NASA/SDO, the HMI Science Team, and Genna Duberstein.

It's always nice to see stories using SDO images on the web. It was pretty cloudy on the East Coast of the United States on Monday and a cloud-free satellite feed is a great backup. Here are a few examples where SDO images were used to share the Mercury transit to the world.

• http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/eclipse/index.html (Of course!) Lots of stills and movies from SDO, including the composite image at the top of this post.
• https://www.facebook.com/NASA.Little.SDO/?fref=nf
• http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/05/10/nasa_solar_dynamics_observatory_animations_of_the_mercury_transit.html (great headline on the story!)
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/health-science/mercury-makes-rare-move-across-the-sun/2016/05/09/072ef4aa-15f6-11e6-971a-dadf9ab18869_video.html (link goes to a video series but the Mercury transit video should be at the top of the list)
• http://www.scientificamerican.com/video/mercury-s-rare-road-trip/ (shows a set of short segments, look for the smiley face in the Sun in the HMI full passage video)
• http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36252487
• http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/science/watch-mercury-sail-across-the-sun.html?_r=0
• http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/10/nasa-mercury-sun-transit-video/

SDO will now return to its regularly scheduled observations of the Sun — in better than UltraHD!