Mercury is a very difficult planet to image. It's
always too close to the sun or too low in the sky. Most of this
observations were done during the day when the planet (and the
Sun) are high in the sky. As such, seeing conditions are usually
moderate.
I do believe that surface details are present
on the best images, but much of it should be just noise.
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2004-07-03 |
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| 2004/03/25 |
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2003/09/24 |
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2003/07/24
On this images I tried to use two Wratten filters to cut visible wavelengths. I also worked with the old Black and White Quickcam because it's CCD is very sensitive in the near infrared. The images look more detailed and the planet's limb is better defined.
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| 2003/07/16 |
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2003/05/07
Mercury transit. Image made with improvised "solar telescope".
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2003/04/09
Another image taken with good seeing conditions. The same features are visible. You can check the original datasets here.
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2003/04/05
Best image yet. Seeing was good and I took a lot of AVIs to select only the very best frames. Here you can see the Red and RGB datasets. The final result look very detailed and sharp, for a planet with a size of only 6''. It also compares well to the images taken in the days before. For example, two light spots are seen along the terminator on all images. Also, a dark patch running north-south along the planet's "middle" is visible. This feature also seems to rotate "to the right" from day to day (planetary rotation) ?
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2003/04/04
Conditions not as good as the day before, but better camera settings. The detail level looks lower before, because the raw images have better dynamic and less noise. As such, fewer false details are see. Note the dark shading on the southern hemisphere near the terminator.
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2003/04/03
First Mercury image with the QuickCam Pro 4000 in average conditions. The camera settings were not set for optimal daytime performance, and as such the image suffers from too much noise. So some of the details visible here are in reality processing artifacts.
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2002/07/01 & 2002/07/05
Two images taken 4 days apart with average seeing. The dark features near the terminator were recorded on both occasions.
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| 2002/05/01 |
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2002/05/01
Good seeing |
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2002/04/20
An image taken with good seeing conditions
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2000/02/12
In 2000 I tried a Meade 8'' LX200 and decided to test it even during the day. So I used the Sun for an alignment star and 'told' the scope to move to Mercury. Conditions were good and that week I managed to image the planet on two days with two different cameras - the B&W QC and the color WebCam II. Some details seemed to be present.
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1994/06/..
In 1994 I tried to record Mercury using a camcorder and a 2.4'' altazimutal refractor. The resulting image is only a few pixels wide in the original frames. Even so the planet's phase was recorded.
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