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transit of Mercury across the Sun as seen from Venus takes place when the planet Mercury passes directly between the Sun and Venus, obscuring a small part of the Sun's disc for an observer on Venus. During a transit, Mercury can be seen from Venus as a small black disc moving across the face of the Sun. A central transit may last up over 8 hours, although presently transit's duration rarely exceed 7 hours (last time it happened in 1899, next one is in 2064).

Transits of Mercury from Venus occur in an irregular fashion: sometimes there are several per decade, while on other occasions there are longer gaps. The overall frequency seems to be somewhat greater than the frequency of transits of Mercury from Earth.

Naturally, no one has ever seen a transit of Mercury from Venus.

The Mercury-Venus synodic period is 144.5662 days. It can be calculated using the formula 1/(1/P-1/Q), where P is the orbital period of Mercury (87.968435 days) and Q is the orbital period of Venus (224.695434 days).

The inclination of Mercury's orbit with respect to Venus's ecliptic is 4.33°, which is less than its value of 7.00° with respect to Earth's ecliptic.

The transit that occurred on March 22, 1894 was particularly interesting because on the 21st, when it began, there were also transits of Venus and of Mercury visible from Saturn. There was no overlap among the three transits, however.


Adapted from the Wikipedia article Transit of Mercury from Venus, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki