Local amateur astronomer Bob Ulrichsen took this photo of the Transit of Mercury this morning.
The relatively rare celestial event, in which the planet Mercury passes between Earth and the Sun, making the hot little planet visible as a small black circle on the yellow-orange face of the Sun, has ended.
“Mercury is the small black dot on the lower edge,” he said in an email.
|The other spot is a solar storm. The transit started at 7:10 a.m. and lasted seven and a half hours. During this time, Mercury crosses the sun.
“The photo was taken about 7:30 a.m. This event occurs about 13 times per century.
“The next will be 11 November 2019. It is interesting that if Mercury were the size of the Earth, the black spot would only be 2.6 times larger, so we can have a feel of how much bigger the sun is than our planet.”
