Mercury to almost skip India in transit tomorrow

New Delhi, Nov 7: Most of India will be missing the transit of Mercury on Wednesday, a rare celestial event in which the planet appears to move as a dot on the face of the Sun.

Sky watchers in the North-East and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands could, however, be able to get a glimpse of the transit during the sunrise on Thursday like most of the East Asia.

The transit of Mercury, last seen from India in 2003, will be visible from many parts of America and Australia though Europe will be missing it completely.

Indians will have to wait till 2016 for the next Mercury transit.

In the North-East, the transit can be viewed for just five minutes after the sunrise the day after tomorrow. For example, in Agartala, the Sun rises at 0535 hrs on Thursday while the transit ends at 0540 hrs.

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

''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,'' Nehru Planetarium Director Dr N Rathnasree told UNI.

Transit of planets is a relatively rare celestial phenomenon in which one planet appears to come in front of another planet in the solar system. Transits of Mercury and Venus, which are not far away from the Earth's orbit, are visible from the Earth.

Historically, while the transit of Venus has 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.

UNI