14 DAY TRIAL // Officials managing the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), have just uploaded a new image relayed back to Earth by the telescope, showing Jupiter and Mercury in conjunction.
Both planets can be seen to the right of the Sun. Mercury is the bright light at the top of the duo, while Jupiter is at the bottom. Though both appear to be of similar brightness, the former is small, rocky and nearby, whereas the latter is very large, distant, and made primarily out of gas, Universe Today reports.
This impressive photo has been collected with the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C3 instrument aboard SOHO, which has thus far produced a massive amount of data for the international astronomical community.
SOHO launched on December 2, 1995, aboard an Atlas II AS delivery system, for a planned 2-year mission. Now, nearly sixteen and a half years later, it is still producing relevant data, becoming one of the longest-lived solar observatories ever deployed to space.