Crescent Mercury in daylight
Taken by PAOLO PALMA on June 14, 2026 @
Rome, Italy
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Details:
Among the planets visible at sunset these evenings is Mercury: it is small, fast-moving, distant and usually low on the horizon, so observing it is not that easy.
It is even more difficult to spot the phases that, like Venus, it displays as it orbits the Sun. But it is not impossible.
So I am admiring the spectacle of its small crescent before it returns to conjunction with the Sun. It is visible through a telescope even at medium magnifications, but the phases are more easily distinguishable when the planet is high on the horizon and the sky is still very bright.
Here is how it looked yesterday and how it looked today through the eyepiece of my 18-inch Dobsonian telescope at 218x magnification when the Sun was still some degreeds above the horizont. I captured it with my smartphone using a 3x zoom and further cropped the images.
Over the next two weeks, it will become increasingly larger and thinner, but also harder to spot.
Photographer's website:
https://www.unsaltonelcielo.it
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