This is a view of the planet Mercury (a black dot) as seen by TRACE through the 1600 Ångstrom ultraviolet filter. Because the TRACE field-of-view is much smaller than the solar disk, the spacecraft is repointed three times during the transit (creating the position jumps of the movie).

This movie was generated from telemetry which has undergone a minimum of processing (to deliver quickly for the media) so data dropouts and other quick-processing artifacts may be visible. Special thanks to Dawn Myers of the TRACE project for this effort.