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Transit Of Mercury From JupiterA transit of Mercury across the Sun as seen from Jupiter takes place when the planet Mercury passes directly between the Sun and Jupiter, obscuring a small part of the Sun's disc for an observer on Jupiter. During a transit, Mercury can be seen from Jupiter as a small black disc moving across the face of the Sun. Naturally, no one has ever seen a transit of Mercury from Jupiter, nor is this likely to happen in any foreseeable future. Nevertheless, the next one will take place on December 25 2005. A transit could hypothetically be observed from the surface of one of Jupiter's moons rather than from Jupiter itself. The times and circumstances of the transits would naturally be slightly different. The Mercury-Jupiter synodic period is 89.792 days. It can be calculated using the formula 1/(1/P-1/Q), where P is the sidereal orbital period of Mercury (87.968435 days) and Q is the orbital period of Jupiter (4330.595 days). The inclination of Mercury's orbit with respect to Jupiter's ecliptic is 6.29°, which is less than its value of 7.00° with respect to Earth's ecliptic. Note: the images linked to in the following table do NOT take into account the finite speed of light. The distance of Mercury from Jupiter at inferior conjunction is approximately 4.8 AU, which would correspond to about 40 light-minutes. It can take up to 9 hours for Mercury to transit across the Sun at its widest point, thus the images correspond fairly closely to what would actually be seen by an observer on Jupiter. The images correspond to a hypothetical observer at the center of Jupiter. Since Jupiter has a very large radius, the parallax of Mercury between Jupiter's center and its north or south pole would be about 20.5", which is about 16 times Mercury's apparent angular diameter of 1.3", or about 5.3% of the Sun's angular diameter (about 6.5'). Therefore, some extremely close near-misses might be seen as grazing transits at Jupiter's poles. Near misses are indicated with strikeout. See also References External links
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