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Hi, my name is Padi Boyd. I'm an astrophysicist here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and I work on the Transiting

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Exoplanet Survey Satellite Mission also known as TESS.

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It's really exciting day for us here on planet Earth. Earth and all the planets in our solar system

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are orbiting the Sun, our star, in a plane. So that means we're all basically in a flat pancake compared to the Sun and on

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the very special days when all the geometry lines up,

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We on Earth can watch the planets that are closer to the Sun than us, Venus or Mercury, pass right in front of the face of

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the Sun and today's the day for the transit of Mercury.

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So, it's definitely very important to never look at the sun with your naked eye. You can do some damage, but we are lucky.

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We have all kinds of technology that can help us see this event. One of the best ways to see it will be to go online to

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watch the livestream from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a very powerful solar observatory in space, that's going to see

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Mercury transit from the beginning to the end, but also lots of astronomy clubs will have telescopes set up if the

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conditions are good. Some science museums will have events so you can go online and see what's happening near you.

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You can learn all kinds of additional information about stars and planets by going on @NASASun or @NASAUniverse on

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social media.