Watch Get ready! Coming Month Mercury will Move in front of the Sun Video in a rare event

If you're not before now excited enough that Earth is about to skill spectacular meteor showers as it move through the tail of Halley's Comet, and then wrap your head roughly this - at the start of May we're also leaving to be clever to watch the littlest planet Mercury travel in front of the Sun.

Because Mercury's orbit is so tight, its transit is extra common than the twice-in-a-century transit of Venus. But it's at rest a rare event, and the planet won't travel between our star and planet once more for another 3 and a half years, so don't miss out on the opportunity to feel humbled by presently how giant our Sun really is. Here's everything you require to know to watch.

The transit of Mercury occur when Mercury passes between the Sun and Earth, and happens around 13 or 14 times every century. This year the event kicks off on May 9 just after 7am EDT (9pm AEST, 11am UTC), with the planet taking around 8 hours to create its glorious way across the Sun.

The good news is that the complete event will be noticeable to those on North America's east coast, as well as nearly all of South America, Western Europe and the west coast of Africa. And stargazers in western Asia and western North America will also be bright to see part of the transit.

You might also require some magnification to be able to see the whole thing, because Mercury is going to appear pretty tiny in front of the Sun (it's 1/160th of the Sun's diameter).

"Still with proper equipment, Mercury can be hard to see, because it is so small compare to the size of the Sun," writes Geoff Gaherty for Space.com. "I observed the transit of 1999 with an 80-mm refractor, and found that I required a magnification of 67x in order to see Mercury; it was too small to see at 45x."

So one time you've got the right equipment sorted, what can you wait for to see? The event is pretty similar to the transit of Venus back in 2012, except for smaller, so basically it looks like a small black dot moving across the surface of the Sun - which arguably isn't fairly as pretty as a meteor shower or solar eclipse. But there's so much extra to it than that.

For me, the majority exciting thing about observing a transit is extra aesthetic than scientific. To see a tiny world silhouetted against the mighty sun gives a arresting view of the scale of the Solar System," writes Gaherty.

After Every one, how often do we get to see a planet roughly 77 million km (48 million miles) away from us pass in front of the star that gives us life, and actually have the chance to ponder our place in the Milky Way?

If all the telescopes and filters sound like too a great deal work, or you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time to witness the event, like we are, you can verify out the livestream via Slooh below. Like, and don't forget to locate those alarms: