“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Monday, May 09, 2016

Mercury's transit only happens 16 times a century


Don't forget to watch the transit of Mercury on any one of the web-based live space channels. It's already started and will last about 7 hours.

Public Service Announcement: unless you are really spectacularly stupid, you should know not to look directly at the sun with binoculars or a telescope. Obviously Mercury is tiny and you cannot see it against the brightness of the sun, so unless you have special goggles that allow direct-sun viewing, the only way to watch it is on the web where they do have special cameras for sun viewing. 

2 comments:

Bill said...

For the much rarer transit of Venus a couple of years ago, I simply held a pair of binoculars such that the image was projected on a sheet of paper. A small telescope would work as well.

Ed said...

That would probably work for Mercury if you could hold the target surface at the right distance for good focus.