Mercury And The Moon

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and never moves far from our parent star in Earth's sky . Racing around its tight orbit, this well-done world is a little over 1/3 the diameter of Earth and is often lost to our view in the solar glare. But, just one day before the August 11 total solar eclipse , astronomer Tunc Tezel captured this fleeting view of a close conjunction of Mercury and the soon to be silhouetted Moon as seen from Turkey. Mercury at the lower right shines brightly in reflected sunlight while only a thin crescent of the almost new Moon is directly illuminated. The rest of the lunar nearside is faintly visible though, illuminated by light from an almost full Earth . On Monday, November 15th, Mercury will actually be seen to transit or pass across the disk of the Sun for well placed observers in the pacific hemisphere .