Rare Mercury Transit Event Captured Live
May 13, 2016
Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO/Genna Duberstein
On May 9th 2016, ADNET scientists and education staff working with over 600 scientists from around the country, the Goddard communications office, and the Goddard Amateur Astronomy Club supported the rare Transit of Mercury. They provided telescope viewing, media interviews, and a social media campaign called “Small Worlds Week.” ADNET web developers successfully live streamed the full transit to the Sun Earth Days/Small Worlds Week website from the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope. They also coordinated with the JSOC data center at Stanford University to retrieve near-real time HD images and video from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) that complemented the ground-based observations. This composite image of Mercury’s journey across the sun was created with visible-light images from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on SDO.
