I took advantage of being at a very dark-sky location (Mt. Washington skiing resort on Vancouver Island) to observe the planet Mercury at it’s greatest Eastern elongation, right after the sunset. Being the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury is notoriously difficult to see. Today, it reached its widest separation of 18.7 degrees east of the Sun.
I walked outside of our chalet in the Alpine Village and could easily see the bright planet right above the tree tops, just as predicted by my astronomy app (see below). I didn’t have any camera besides my iPhone or even a tripod, but still was able to take the above hand-held photo, thanks to Apple’s magic of computational photography.
There, Mercury is the bright dot in the lower right, just above the tree line. Well above it, on a nearly-vertical line, are the two brightest stars in the constellation of Aries, the Ram – the orange giant Hamal (“the lamb” in Arabic), whose diameter is 15 times the Sun’s, and slightly dimmer Sheratan below it. The brightest dot in the upper left of the picture is Jupiter.
Through a telescope, Mercury would have exhibited a half-illuminated waning phase, but I was happy enough to see it with the naked eye, on its best-looking day of the year and under some of the best local viewing conditions.
