Watch NASA’s Cinematic SDO Observatory Timelapse Of Mercury’s Transit Past The Sun Yesterday

Yesterday (May 9, 2016) Mercury made one of its rare transits past the Sun. The alignment of Earth, Mercury and the Sun occurs roughly 13 times per century, and now — thanks to NASA’s remarkable Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) — we can watch this transit in three different analyses of the Sun’s magnetic field: 1)solar wind, 2) energetic particles, and 3) variations in the solar irradiance. For more info on the Mercury transit visit NASA.gov/transit, and for all my best NASA stories visit NASA on FEELguide. And in case you haven’t yet seen them: I’ve also attached Max Shiskin’s amazing Cinema Space Tribute below, as well as the short documentary, OVERVIEW, which chronicles astronauts’ life-changing stories of seeing the Earth from a distance — a perspective-altering experience which is often described as The Overview Effect. (Source: Kottke; video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Genna Duberstein; music: Encompass by Mark Petrie)
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