Published March 2017
| Published
Journal Article
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Using the 2016 Transit of Mercury to Find the Distance to the Sun
Abstract
The May 9, 2016, transit of Mercury was observed simultaneously from the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California and from a site in Germany. From the measured displacement between the views from the two sites of Mercury's disk silhouetted against the solar granulation, we were able to calculate the distance to the Sun in linear units (kilometers), not merely the proportionality given by Kepler's third law.
Additional Information
© 2017 American Association of Physics Teachers. We acknowledge the collaboration at the Big Bear Solar Observatory of its faculty and staff, including Dale Gary, Bin Chen, Claude Plymate, Vasyl Vurchyshyn, and John Varsik. We were pleased to have Robert Lucas (Sydney) and Evan Zucker (San Diego) join us for transit observations. We thank Udo Backhaus of Universität Duisberg-Essen, Germany, for his comments.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 78309
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170616-160918081
- Created
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2017-06-16Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field