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This video shows the progress of the eclipse as I
saw it from my home near Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Mercury and the Sun are sized proportionately rel-
ative to each other, the Sun appearing 195x larger
than Mercury. The simulation takes 16½ seconds to
complete, which I chose so that three seconds of the animation corresponded to one
hour of transit time. The transit took almost exactly 5½ hours to
complete and from Virginia we could see the whole event.
There will not be another transit until 2032, so
we will go the entire decade of the 2020's with-
out seeing Mercury crossing the face of the Sun.
That event will also be of the November type as
this one was, but unfortunately for would-be ob-
servers in North America, it is still night time
at the time of the transit. Observers in Africa,
as well as central and eastern Europe, will have
the luck of seeing it in its entirety, and South
Americans will see the ending of the transit.
To add insult to injury, the next transit occurs
in 2039, and that one will not be visible either
to North Americans! I may actually have observed
the last Mercury transit of my life on this cool
day in November 2019.
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