Mercury Crosses the Sun in Stunning Ultra-High Resolution

A transit of Mercury occurs when the tiny planet passes between the sun and Earth, such that people on the ground can see a silhouette of Mercury as it moves across the surface of the star. The small planet, with a diameter just over a third of Earth's, can be hard to see with the naked eye, but is easy to spot in the new video recorded on May 9. The movie, which has 4K visual resolution, was created using data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit o