Clear skies over southern England and convenient timing combined for once to give us a magnificent view of the transit of Mercury on 7 May 2003. This picture was taken by my colleague Tony Cooper at Liss Mill, Hampshire, using a 2 megapixel Canon Sureshot A40 digital camera pointing into a 35mm Meade 4000 series eyepiece on my Celestron C5+ Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope fitted with a Thousand Oaks full-aperture solar filter. Mercury is the small dot near the top of the Sun. The other dark areas on the Sun, including the huge (compared to Mercury) region in the middle, are sunspots.