The passage of a planet across the face of the Sun is a rare event.
As seen from Earth, only transits of Mercury and Venus are possible.
On the average, there are 13 transits of Mercury in a century.
In comparison, transits of Venus occur in pairs with more than a century separating each pair.
By chance the next one will be in 2004.
The first "contact" of the planet with the Sun occurred at 05:12:56 UT at position angle 15°. Time is valid for a geocentric "located" observer. The position angle is defined as the direction of Mercury with respect to the center of the Sun's disk as measured counterclockwise from the celestial north point on the Sun. From my site I was unable to take images before middle of the transit. Several short video sequences were captured till to the last contact which appeared at 10:31:46 UT at PA 291°. Here I present a couple of my results, which were made with a cheap color video-camera. The telescope used was a 1000mm f/10 refractor, which serves as a finder/guiding telescope for my 10"-Newtonian. The tremedous amout of solar light was reduced by a Baader Solar-filter (dens. 3.5) and in addition I used a blue filter for further reduction. Individual frames from the videos were selected with help of virtualdub. For scaling to 70% (from 640x480) and converting to jpeg I used IrfanView. Both are free software products available on the internet.
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