Most of India to miss Mercury Transit on Nov 8

New Delhi, Nov 6 (UNI) Most of India will be missing the transit of Mercury on Wednesday, a celestial event visible from many parts of America and Australia.

Star gazers in the North-East could, however, witness the transit when Mercury will pass through the disk of the Sun, just for about five minutes after the sunrise on Thursday.

Eastern Asia will be similarly seeing sunrise view of the ending phase of the transit.

The last transit of Mercury in 2003 was well visible from India and had been observed by many amateur astronomers.

The next visible transit from India will be during May 2016.

''One would require an absolutely clear horizon a little South of the East, with no clouds hanging low in the sky, a near impossibility, to be able to view the transit from India,'' said Nehru Planetarium Director Dr N Rathnasree.

The conditions for viewing are slightly better in the Nicobar Islands where the Sun rises at 0504 hrs on Thursday and at Port Blair where the sunrise is at 0514 hrs.

In Agartala, however, the sunrise is at 0535 hrs while the transit ends at 0540 hrs, giving a viewing time of just five minutes.

Historically, while the transit of Venus have been the most important for measuring the distance between the Sun and the Earth, there have been many Mercury transits that are also well recorded and have been used to study the variations in solar diameter over the last few hundred years.

In 1868, for instance, a transit of Mercury was visible from India, which was observed by astronomer Ankitam Venkata Narsinga Rao from his observatory in Visakhapatnam. His observations were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomial Society, London.

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