Celestia Forums

yesterday i saw with some other people, the mercury transit trough a telescope. and before we saw it, a man that knows a lot about astronomy gave us a speech about mercury.
and he told that next year, on june 6th we will se a Venus transit.
here is the picture of what we will see
enjoy it.

[quote="ElPelado"]yesterday i saw with some other people, the mercury transit trough a telescope. and before we saw it, a man that knows a lot about astronomy gave us a speech about mercury.
and he told that next year, on june 6th we will se a Venus transit.
here is the picture of what we will see
enjoy it.
quote]

My information are for a different date, and exactly June 8th, starting at about 05:20:42 UT, ending at about 11:04:42 UT.
By

Andrea

when i heard the spach he also talk about the 8th or the 18th, i can trememeber, but i fund it i ncelestia on the 6th, so maybe is an error on earth or venus orbits, or both.

El Pelado,

Please check your screen display again. You may be misreading the date: 2004 06 08 is June 8th.
I get the same picture as you show at about
2004 06 08 08:08:26

you are right selden!!
in Argentina to say June the 8th, we say 8/6/2004, not like in Celestia and in some countries 8/6/2004.
so celestia has not a problem

yeh unfortunately the US prefers to stick with the reverse date order to set itself apart from pretty much every other country in the world except barbados.

And then there's that old "imperial" system of feet and pounds, which it shares with only Liberia and Myanmar ...

Grant

Several months ago I made a strobe picture of the phenomenon. See it here:

http://www.shatters.net/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=Calculus&id=Transit_Venus_Sun_2004_string

Some of you guys are pretty adept with celestial calculation, so maybe you can tell me if there will ever be a simultaneous mercury and venus transit viewable from Earth?

Dalle.

i dont really know, but but i do know is that mercury transits only can happen in may or november, because his orbit is not in the smae plane that earth's orbit.

I wouldn't be surprised if there where some 'resonance' effect between the three orbits making this impossible (on the short term, a few million years).

To transit at the same time, they'd need to have their ascending nodes on the ecliptic aligned - otherwise Earth, Mercury, Venus and the Sun can never line up.
Their nodes are currently misaligned by about a month - Mercury transits in May and November, Venus in June and December. That translates to Venus' node being around thirty degrees ahead of Mercury's at present - a more precise figure in 2000.0 was 28.34902 degrees.
But both planets' orbits are twisting backwards in the ecliptic plane, Venus about twice as fast as Mercury, so Venus' node is sliding back to catch Mercury's - but at only 550.59 arcseconds per century.

So (being a little simplistic about it): in ~18,500 years' time, we'll have the possibility of a simultaneous transit!

Grant