Rare Mercury Transit captured by NASA in this video, next such celestial event only in 2032

The rare celestial event of the smallest planet in our solar system Mercury taking a shot at the Sun on Monday was seen across the Earth as a small dot but encapsulated forever by NASA in its video. The Mercury Transit from 7:35 am ET, lasted for slightly more than five hours, providing enough time for sky watchers take a look for now.

The Mercury Transit was visible in the US East Coast, Canada, South and Central America throughout its transit while the rest of the globe captured s small sliver of it. Those in Asia, including Singapore, and Australia missed the event entirely.

However, in Maryland, many NASA scientists missed it due to cloudy weather. Otherwise, stargazers used solar filtered binoculars and telescopes to spot Mercury, that passed between Earth and the sun on Monday. NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory covered the event live. NASA has shared the video and some photos of the transit, including one with the Washington Monument in the background.

The rare celestial event takes place only 13 times per century, and the last transit was in 2016 and the next one will be in 2032, to be followed in 2049. Prof. Mike Cruise, president of the Royal Astronomical Society said, "This is a rare event, and we'll have to wait 13 years until it happens again.Transits are a visible demonstration of how the planets move around the Sun." Mercury's orbit around the Sun takes 88 days to complete and it passes between the Earth and Sun every 116 days.

A visible transit happens only when the Earth, Mercury and the Sun are exactly in line in three dimensions. The first transit was discovered in 1631, almost 20 years after the invention of the telescope by French astronomer Pierre Gassendi.

NASA has sent so far two space probes to Mercury -- Mariner 10 in 1974 and 1975, and MESSENGER, which orbited the planet from 2011 until a deliberate crash landing undertaken in 2015. The next European Space Agency mission BepiColombo launched in 2017, is on its way to study the planet from 2024.