Transit of Mercury – Live!

There will be a rare astronomical event this Monday, November 11, 2019, when Mercury passes in front of the sun. We’ll be streaming it live from NJ using a telescope. The event occurs only about 13 times a century.

Click on the player to see the live stream during the event!  We’ll also stream the end, at 1:00pm EST, and on the quarter-hour in between, as well.  Weather permitting!

transit of Mercury
Transit at 11:47am EST

Technical information

  • Questar 3.5 Cassegrain-Maksutov telescope with chromium solar filter
  • Lumix GH2 camera, 1080p24 source video
  • KanexPro HDMI/3G-SDI converter
  • Haivision Makito X video encoder /streamer, down-converted to 720p
  • HLS playback on HTML5 with Flash fallback for older browsers

Special thanks to …

  • John Turner, Turner Engineering − encoder, technical support
  • Wowza Media Systems − Wowza Streaming Cloud
  • Cathy McLaughlin − location support
  • Charlotte Cugnini – production assistance
  • Lizzie Cugnini – production assistance