TRACE coverage of the
Mercury Transit
November 15, 1999


About every 5-10 years the planet Mercury transits the solar disk such that we may view it from Earth. The last transit occurred in 1993 and the next one will happen in 2004. Visit Fred Espinak's Transit 99 pages for considerably more detail.

The Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) Instrument ran Fe IX (171 Å), UV Continuum (1600 Å), and white light (5000 Å) images during the Mercury transit of the solar disk on 15-Nov-1999. What follows are a couple of movies from the 21:00UT hourly file. The 171 movie has some fuzzy stuff in it that's due to TRACE passing through the radiation belts; the 1600 and WL movies don't suffer from this so much due to shorter exposure times. Also be sure to visit the Yohkoh/SXT Science Nugget to see the predictions used to plan this campaign.

Note: To view the javascript movies, you need to turn on javascript in your browser.


TRACE Fe IX/X 171 Å (JavaScript, Big but fancy UI)
(GIF Format, 3.95 MB)
(MPEG Format, 203kB)


TRACE UV Continuum 1600 Å (JavaScript)
(GIF, 3.43 MB)
(MPEG, 145 kB)


TRACE WL Continuum 5000 Å (JavaScript)
(GIF, 1.94 MB)
(MPEG, 56 kB)

Other Mercury sites:


TRACE Home
Brian N. Handy
Last modified: Wed Dec 12 11:30 MST 1999