Mercury Only 9.9° from the Sun
Taken by Helio C. Vital on June 29, 2017 @
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
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Details:
Attached are a small animation of Mercury and a still image that hints at a fragment of its apparent path a few minutes before setting. Mercury reached superior conjunction only 8 days ago (on June 21) and will be at maximum eastern elongation (27.2°E) on July 30. So, this is in fact a very early sighting of the planet, located through the LCD monitor of the camera at 100x zoom just as the Sun had dropped 4° below the horizon. A Sony Cyber-shot HX200V camera was used to take the photos from 17:34 to 17:39 (UTC-3h) as the altitude of the elusive planet (currently at magnitude -1.2) lowered from 4.7° to 3.6° (azimuth=298°). It is still very close to the Sun, only 9.9° away, so little that it could still be seen in Soho`s Lasco C3 field of view yesterday.
PhotoScape was used to make the 9-frame animation. Each frame had been obtained by stacking 10 photos with Registax. The still image is a composite made with Startrails freeware and processed with PhotoScape to enhance contrast. Clouds of smoke and a passing plane can also be noticed in the background. Mars was also in the same field of view, but too faint (14 times dimmer than Mercury) to show up in the images.
Photographer's website:
http://https://www.flickr.com/helio_c_vital
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