STEREO-A is now on the other side of the Sun, over 290 million km (180 million miles) away (See Where is STEREO? ). Recently, a new planet has appeared in the field of view of it sun-pointed instruments: Earth. You can see Earth and Mercury in this movie from STEREO Ahead's SECCHI Cor2 coronagraph. The location of the Sun (hidden by a disk so we can see its faint outer atmosphere) is shown with the white circle. The horizontal lines through the two planets are due to saturation effects in the detector - the planets are brighter than the solar features the cameras were designed for.





More...