Museum visitors see rare celestial event

Visitors at the Museum of Aviation on Monday had a chance to see a rare celestial event.

From just after dawn until about 2:45 p.m., Mercury could be seen as a tiny black dot against the sun, if viewers had a telescope with some kind of eye protection.

Stephen Rahn, an amateur astronomer from Macon, brought telescopes to allow people to see the event. Rahn said it happens only 13 times in a century.

“It’s a fairly rare thing to see,” he said.

Only two other objects transit the sun from the vantage point of Earth, and that’s the moon and Venus.

Rahn brought a hydrogen alpha telescope, which allows the viewer to see only the visible spectrum of light occupied by hydrogen, which all stars contain.

The other scope blocks out 99 percent of light so that it doesn’t damage the viewer’s eye. In each scope. viewers could see Mercury as a distinct tiny black dot against the sun.

Make one dot with a black ballpoint pin on a circle of paper the size of a basketball, and that is about the size of Mercury against the sun.

Rahn was getting a steady stream of viewers, including several home school groups, wanting to have a look.

Lamarcus Smith and his fiancee, Demetria Harris, stopped by to see it.

“It was pretty cool,” he said.

People also could see it with binoculars if they used a solar filter.

The transit happens only when the paths of Earth and Mercury line up directly with the sun. It happens sporadically, with the next transit to occur on Nov. 11, 2019. However, the next one after that won’t happen until 2032.

This story was originally published May 9, 2016 at 2:52 PM with the headline "Museum visitors see rare celestial event."