Mercury

Not having seen Mercury for many years I was rather happy to catch the little, sun-grazing inner planet during yesterday’s beautiful sunset.




While the picture doesn’t look like much, if you look closely you can see the little moon-like disk shape of the planet. The picture was taken at around 60x magnification using a Nikon P900 bridge camera.

For comparison, here’s a picture I took of Venus using the the same camera and magnificaton a few weeks earlier:




As you can see, the image is much crisper as the venusian planetary disk appears much larger than Mercury’s (both because Venus is much closer to earth and also considerably larger). The Mercury image was zoomed in using the “GIMP” image processing software on Linux, here’s the picture in its original size:

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