Latest Astronomical transit Stories

A team of astronomers led by John Johnson of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy has used a new technique to measure the precise size of a planet around a distant star. They used a camera so sensitive that it could detect the passage of a moth in front of a lit window from a distance of 1,000 miles.The camera, mounted on the UH 2.2-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, measures the small decrease in brightness that occurs when a planet passes in front of its star along the...

Each evening, I go outside and look overhead at the Summer Triangle: three bright stars high above my home in California. Then I dream about what will happen when we find another Earth, a habitable planet around a distant sun. In less than a year, the first actual observations to make this dream come true will be underway with NASA's Kepler mission. Kepler is NASA's first mission capable of finding Earth-size and smaller planets in the habitable zone of distant stars. The Kepler...

NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft was about a million miles from Earth last month when it photographed the Moon passing in front of the sun. The resulting movie looks like it came from an alien solar system. NASA -- When scientists announce they're about to calibrate their instruments, science writers normally put away their pens. It's hard to write a good story about calibration. This may be the exception:On Feb. 25, 2007, NASA scientists were calibrating some cameras aboard the STEREO-B spacecraft...

The launch of COROT on December 21, 2006 is a long awaited event in the quest to find planets beyond our Solar System. Searching from above the Earth's atmosphere, COROT "“ the CNES project with ESA participation - will be the first space mission specifically dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets.COROT is expected to greatly enlarge the number of known exoplanets during its two-year mission and provide the first detection of rocky planets, perhaps just a few times the mass of the...

On Wednesday, Mercury will pass directly between the Sun and the Earth. The innermost planet will be seen not as a bright point in the sky but as a tiny black dot, silhouetted against the brilliant surface of the Sun. Although this spectacle is not visible from Europe, the ESA-NASA solar satellite SOHO will be watching. Such a crossing is known as a transit. From Earth's vantage point, only Mercury and Venus transit the Sun, because these are the only planets inside Earth's orbit. In the...

Mark your calendar: On Wednesday, Nov 8th, the planet Mercury will pass directly in front the Sun. The transit begins at 2:12 pm EST (11:12 am PST) and lasts for almost five hours. Good views can be had from the Americas, Hawaii, Australia and all along the Pacific Rim: visibility map.What will it look like? A picture is worth a thousand words:During the transit, Mercury's tiny disk"”jet black and perfectly round"”will glide slowly across the face of the Sun. Only a speck of the Sun's...

Scientists from Williams College and the University of Arizona will observe Mercury in front of Venus from vantage points on earthbound mountains and with orbiting spacecraft on Wednesday. Nov. 8. Jay Pasachoff of Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts) and Glenn Schneider of the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona (Tucson, Arizona) will be perched at the University of Hawaii's solar observatory, at the rim of the giant Haleakala crater at an altitude of 10,000 feet on the...

This image is a never-before-seen astronomical alignment of a moon traversing the face of Uranus, and its accompanying shadow. The white dot near the center of Uranus' blue-green disk is the icy moon Ariel. The 700-mile-diameter satellite is casting a shadow onto the cloud tops of Uranus. To an observer on Uranus, this would appear as a solar eclipse, where the moon briefly blocks out the Sun as its shadow races across Uranus's cloud tops.Though such "transits" by moons across the...

Sunspot, NM -- The planet Venus is best known for the thick layers of clouds that veil its surface from view by telescopes on Earth. But the veil has holes, and a New Mexico State University scientist plans on using a solar telescope to peer through them to study the weather on Venus."Observations of Venus from a nighttime telescope at a single location are very difficult because Venus is so close to the Sun in the sky," said Dr. Nancy Chanover, a planetary scientist at NMSU in Las...

On Thursday, January 13th, Saturn will be 750 million miles from Earth--the closest we get to the ringed planet this year. Science@NASA -- When the sun sets on Thursday, January 13th, a golden star will rise in the east. Soaring overhead at midnight, it will be up all night long, beautiful and eye-catching.That "star" is Saturn.January 13th is a special date for Saturn because that's when it is closest to Earth: only 750 million miles away, compared to a maximum distance of almost a...