The sight of Mercury's tiny round disk drifting slowly across the face of the Sun inspired and entertained many denizens of planet Earth last week.
In fact, artist and astronomer Mark Seibold viewed both the 1999 and 2006 transits of the solar system's innermost planet through solar filtered telescopes and composed this rendering of Mercury "hovering in the photosphere" near the edge of an enormous solar disk.
The original work is a 23 by 17 inch pastel sketch.
While the artist's hand is creatively superimposed, Seibold concentrated on offering an impression of Mercury's silhouette, surrounded by shadings reflecting his visual experience that are not easily captured in photographic exposures.
Of course, before the age of cameras drawings were more widely used to record telescopic observations of sunspots and planetary transits.
I apologize that I do not speak or write German although all my grand parents are from the old country.
I am Mark Seibold, the artist in Portland Oregon that submitted the Hand Drawn Transit of Mercury transitting the sun as observed throughmy h-alpha solar telescope on Nov 8th.
I wanted to thank your site for posting the photo of my pastel sketch.
Un das es sehr gut !
thank you for this marvellous picture. although we just take the pictures from the NASA astronomy picture of the day, i am glad we have such a nice picture on our site, and that you like it being here.
keep on the good work!
To answer your question, I found your site by doing a search on my name and "hand sketched pastel".
As you say that you enjoy the science of astronomy and space art, I have much more in my Myspace.com while not running a professional website right now. >
www.myspace.com/marksolarprophet
Also I wanted to post something here for you, as my other pastels were recently featured in Spaceweather.com > Oct 14th; Oct 31st; Nov 7 ~ 8th; Dec 14th. You can access the site and then enter the dates in the upper right archives.
