[Atmob-discuss] Mercury from Wednesday afternoon

[John Boudreau]

I'm sure many of you have seen the first images from the Messenger spacecraft's first flyby of Mercury on Tuesday afternoon:
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/index.php

The following afternoon, conditions around here were favorable enough to image Mercury with my Celestron 11 and Imaging Source DMK21-series video camera. The basic line-of-sight between Earth and Mercury was roughly similar to that of Messenger the day before, and so the resulting phase isn't very different and the central meridians were similar (Mercury presented about the same face).

I've put together a comparison of my result and a scaled-down version of the Messenger image. It's at the top of this page:
http://home.comcast.net/~jeboud/mercury.htm

As you can see many of the features match. Since Messenger was slightly above the Earth's orbital plane at the time, its image shows more of Mercury's north polar region --- in other words, it was looking slightly down on Mercury as compared to my image.

---John Boudreau