Transit of Mercury from Venus
- Transit of Mercury from Venus
A transit of Mercury across the Sun as seen from Venus takes place when the planet Mercury passes directly between the Sun and Venus, obscuring a small part of the Sun's disc for an observer on Venus. During a transit, Mercury can be seen from Venus as a small black disc moving across the face of the Sun. The duration of a central transit is 6.2 hours.
Transits of Mercury from Venus occur in an irregular fashion: sometimes there are several per decade, while on other occasions there are longer gaps. The overall frequency seems to be somewhat greater than the frequency of transits of Mercury from Earth.
Naturally, no one has ever seen a transit of Mercury from Venus.
The Mercury-Venus synodic period is 144.5662 days. It can be calculated using the formula 1/(1/P-1/Q), where P is the orbital period of Mercury (87.968435 days) and Q is the orbital period of Venus (224.695434 days).
The inclination of Mercury's orbit with respect to Venus's ecliptic is 4.33°, which is less than its value of 7.00° with respect to Earth's ecliptic.
The transit that occurred on March 22, 1894 was particularly interesting because on the 21st, when it began, there were also transits of Venus and of Mercury visible from Saturn. There was no overlap among the three transits, however.
Past and future transits
ee also
* Astronomical transit
References
* Albert Marth, "Note on the Transit of Mercury over the Sun’s Disc, which takes place for Venus on 1894 March 21, and on the Transits of Venus and Mercury, which occur for Saturn’s System on the same day", Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 54 (1894), 172–174. [http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1894MNRAS..54..172M]
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