The last time it happened was in 2003 and the next time will be 2016. The November 2006 transit of Mercury was watched by millions of people and a few spacecraft too.

Occuring between the evening of Wednesday 8th of November to the morning of Thursday 9th, GMT, Mercury appeared to move slowly across the solar disc, looking like a tiny black dot merely 1/94th the size of the Sun. On this occiasion it wasn’t visible from the UK, unlike the Venus transit two years ago.

However in the wondrous age of digital photography and the internet, this doesn’t stop us seeing some lovely pictures. A Flickr search for ‘mercury transit‘ yeiled a whole host of nice images taken by keen observers the globe over.

If you want to know more about the transit, the BBC have a very good page on the story (here) but I shall be happy here with a small collection of the best images from the web.

This is one of the best from the Flickr Collection.

I like this one showing a composite of four stages as Mercury passes across the solar disc.

This was featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day. Mercury is the little dot on the left-hand-side of the image.

To finish this animation of the 2003 Mercury transit is quite captivating as is shows the sheer scale of the Sun compared to it’s first planet. This is taken from Thierry Legault’s incredible image archive.