August 12 2010 conjunction of Venus, Mars, Saturn, with Moon and Mercury

I don't usually blog about things going on in the sky, unless those goings on are things we witness through telescopes or robotic space probes—things that can't be seen with the unaided eye. I thought I'd make an exception in this case.

Mark your calendars for August 12th—and cross your fingers that the weather is clear that evening. Then, plan to be in a spot where you can have an unobstructed view of the western horizon. Check your calendar frequently to remind yourself, and when the date draws near, set your alarm clock….

Okay, what I'm going on about here is an upcoming "conjunction" of objects that will be at its stunning best on this evening. The players: Venus, Mars, Saturn, Mercury, and our own Moon, performing together as an ensemble for a limited engagement, on the stage of the western horizon.

Right now (as of mid June), Saturn (high in the south in Virgo), Mars (in the southwest in Leo, near the bright star Regulus), and Venus (that really stupendously bright thing that will give you second-hand sunburn if you're not careful–low on the western horizon, next to the twin stars of Castor and Pollux, in Gemini) are all strung out in a long, well-spaced line, as if queuing up for some great performance. But, as time goes forward, these three will gradually move closer and closer to each other, gathering toward the western twilight.

Around early to mid August, these three will be in a quite compact little group, at one point forming a nice little triangle. But on August 12, not only will they be in about their tightest grouping of this conjunction, they will be joined by the thin crescent of the Moon, just past the New phase, and that Mercurial planet—what else? Mercury—in one amazing gathering of luminaries.

It's not the end of the world, or a time of great change—at least, not a time of great change CAUSED by the conjunction–but it is a rare and beautiful alignment of celestial bodies that we don't get to see more than once every few years. Hence, I'm blogging about it so you don't miss it!

If this celestial stage act were not reward enough for those who find beauty in nature's rare and wondrous events, August 12th is also the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower, the most reliable of the annual meteor showers.

So, no excuses: make a plan, put together a nocturnal picnic, search a spot from where you can view the western horizon, and, if you can one, that's away from city lights as much as possible (to make it easier to see those meteors).

Enjoy!

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Artist's concept of a Pluto landscape, with moon Charon on
the horizon. NASA.

Observations of Pluto have been made by Hubble before, bringing us the most detailed images of that small world ever taken. Still, the images reveal little more than variations in shading, and in the most recent observations, some color.
The recent images show the dwarf planet from different angles, grabbed at different times as Pluto slowly rotates, once about every six days. The darker areas have been characterized as having a "molasses" color—I'm assuming that means very dark brown, as that's the color of molasses in the bottle in our kitchen.

So, is Pluto's surface oozing with syrupy sugars? First of all, nothing should be oozing at all under the temperatures Pluto routinely experiences. Since Pluto reached its closest approach to the Sun back in the 1980s—something that happens only every 248 years—temperatures have risen to their highest in our lifetimes, and are now up to about -385 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, minus. Global warming on Pluto….

While scientists don't yet know what the deep brown regions are, some expect it has something to do with Pluto's methane, the existence of which we've known for some time from spectroscopic measurements. Methane is a hydrocarbon—an "organic molecule"–whose chemistry is part of the basis of life on Earth.

That's not to say there's life on Pluto—but one theory about the molasses-colored patches is that it may be some sort of tar-like substance that has developed over millions of years from the Sun's weak rays interacting with Pluto's methane. Over its seasonal and orbital gyrations, Pluto's methane cycles from being frozen solid on the ground to being a gas and forming a thin atmosphere; right now that atmosphere is as thick as it's ever been in our lifetimes.

Will astronauts in the distant future have to worry about getting stuck in something sticky when they walk around on Pluto? Too early to tell….

Since childhood I've been fascinated by Pluto—probably more for our lack of knowing it than for anything we actually know (which isn't a whole lot: small, cold, dark, slow, patchy brown, methane, three moons; that's the lion's-share of our knowledge). It's a place of mystery, not unlike Mars and Venus, or Jupiter's Galilean moons, were long ago (like in my childhood), before we sent spacecraft to see them up close, and before we had the powerful eye of Hubble. Mars, at least, we're getting to know pretty well; it still holds plenty of mysteries, but somehow feels not so far removed, and familiar.

And, something else is on the horizon in the exploration of Pluto: in five years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will whiz by and in a few short hours collect an amount of information that will absolutely dwarf all that we have learned since Pluto was discovered in 1930. It's like the treks of Pioneer and Voyager all over again, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when we first visited the Gas Giant planets, and moons like Io and Europa went from being fuzzy blobs with variations in surface shading and color to worlds with craters and volcanoes and ice fissures and…well, let's just say I can hardly wait to get that up-close glimpse of Pluto.

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The view from the control room of Chabot's planetarium during
the live LCROSS lunar impact event

Rewind to October 9th. It was a lot of fun watching the event up here at Chabot. We'd hoped to observe the impact through our 36-inch telescope, Nellie, but were clouded out. Fortunately, the main part of the show was brought to us via satellite from NASA—and from the vantage point of the LCROSS spacecraft, on its collision course with the Moon, where terrestrial weather was not a factor.

Our planetarium was filled—overfilled actually; we had to open up our theater across the hall as an overflow viewing area! Mind you, it was 3:00 in the morning on a Friday, and still over 300 people showed up in various states of caffeination.

I set up the planetarium to resemble the control room of a futuristic starship: a huge spinning animation of the Moon overhead, and several large projections showing simulations of the impending impact, recent images from other lunar missions, and, front and center, the view from NASA, which alternated between Mission Control at Ames Research Center and a live view from the LCROSS spacecraft itself.

The view from LCROSS showed an ever-nearing wall of lunar craters and topography as LCROSS homed in on its fate. The announcement was made that the primary impactor, LCROSS's Centaur upper rocket stage, had impacted, and we all strained our eyes looking for the plume of dust the impact was hoped to produce. But, the impact didn't create as visible an ejecta plume as expected; we stared on, but only saw the wall of craters loom closer and closer.

The four minutes between Centaur impact and the inevitable impact by LCROSS itself ticked by, and we held our breaths. Then, the image went blank, and NASA announced that LCROSS had impacted the Moon. Though we didn't see the plume, it was exciting to ride along with LCROSS to its end, and live to tell about it. Next better thing to being there….

Back to the water. Though no plume of dust was seen by LCROSS's main visible camera, that's not all it had in its toolbox of instruments. Most revealing was data collected by LCROSS's spectrometer—the device that sorts out the wavelengths of light and discriminates the specific wavelengths emitted by specific chemicals. Water (H2O) and hydroxyl (OH) seem to have been present in the dust plumes kicked up from the permanently shadowed floor of Cabeus crater, at the lunar south pole.

And more: other volatile chemicals—whose identities will no doubt be revealed by NASA in coming months in the due course of their data analysis—appear to have been detected in the impact plume.

How much water? Are we talking vast sheets of solid ice, glaciers, and land-locked icebergs? Well…though NASA hasn't yet characterized the quantities of water inferred by LCROSS's detection, the serene waters of Cabeus likely are a mixture of lunar soil and ice—a substance you'd have to work at to extract pure water from.

For more exciting discoveries to come, stay tuned to the Moon….

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Kevin Cain, Digital Capture Supervisor for Maya Skies, demonstrates his innovative image-capture process that replaces expensive custom hardware with affordable consumer equipment.

The film is groundbreaking for a couple of reasons.  It’s the first time the Chabot center is using state-of-the art laser scanning technology to create one of its films.  For Tales of Maya Skies, a team of 25 people spent seven weeks scanning the ruins of the ancient city of Chichén Itzá, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.  This technology is widely used by Hollywood productions because of the flexibility it gives a creative team.  Once they’ve scanned a particular site, they can play with any one of its variables: they can create the illusion that the camera is moving in crazy ways; they can manipulate the light conditions, and they can change the look of the location in any way they want.

The creative team behind Tales of Maya Skies, made up of, among others, Emeryville nonprofit Insight, the San Francisco animation companies Digitrove and Palma VFX, the ARTS Lab at the University of New Mexico, producer Konda Mason and director Jin An Wong, are taking advantage of all the possibilities that the scanning of Chichén Itzá provides.  The audience will be immersed in full-color animations that go beyond showing the ruins of Chichén Itzá as they exist today.  Instead, through laborious historical research, the creative team has reconstructed what the monumental city must have looked like at its peak 1,200 years ago, with temples painted in bright reds, greens, blues and yellows, and incense burning and flags waving atop them.

By using the 3-D digital images created through laser scanners as the raw material for the animations in Tales of Maya Skies, the film is also breaking ground in more indirect, but perhaps even more important, ways.  Insight, the Emeryville nonprofit that oversaw the scanning at Chichén Itzá, as well as the Orinda-based CyArk, another nonprofit that worked on the project, are engaged in scanning irreplaceable sites around the world, documenting them for the benefit of the archaeologists charged with preserving them, as well as for generations to come, which might lose the real thing to natural disasters, war, or the passage of time.  CyArk’s co-founder, Ben Kacyra, has set out to use laser scanners to document 500 sites in five years.

But laser scanners, for all the wonderful detail, speed and flexibility they offer, are expensive.  They can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000.  That’s why Kevin Cain, Insight’s director, has been testing an alternative system that can accomplish the same thing at a fraction of the cost. All the gear he needs is a digital camera, a flash and software, at a total cost of under $2,000.  Here’s how it works.  For every 32-square-foot swatch of an object, Cain takes 10 still photos with his camera and flash.  Then he uses the photos to reconstruct the object based on the brightness of each individual point on its surface.  The system is based on a principle of physics discovered in the 18^th century.  The high quality of today’s cheap digital cameras is what makes it possible to apply this principle to create an inexpensive image-capturing system.

“With this new technique, our ultimate goal is to be able to provide very low-cost, very usable results for archaeologists,” Cain said, “because until the price goes almost to zero, archaeologists aren’t going to be able to adopt it, just given the realities of their field.”  To illustrate those realities, Cain used the example of the work that Insight has done in Egypt for the past decade.  Each year they join a team of archaeologists for their field work at the Tomb of Ramses.  A complete yearly field season costs under $50,000, many times the cost of an inexpensive laser scanner.

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Three views of Jupiter before, during, and after the disappearing act by its four large moons. Credit, Conrad Jung, Chabot Space & Science Center

What am I talking about? About a week ago a relatively rare alignment of Jupiter and its four Galilean moons—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—made for a brief time in which the moons disappeared, hidden behind and in front of their massive parent planet. For that brief time, Earth, Jupiter, and all four Galileans coincided on a nearly perfect line.

The event took place late in the evening on September 2nd, a little after 10:00 PM. Ganymede (the Solar System's largest moon) and Europa (the "snowball" with the probable deep liquid water oceans under its icy crust) crossed in front of Jupiter's disk, and the other pair, Io (the volcano moon) and Callisto passed behind it.

It's not uncommon for one of these moons to be out of view for a time when you aim a telescope at Jupiter. Even Galileo, on his first telescopic look at Jupiter, saw only three of them.

The disappearance of two or three of them at once is more rare, however, and a vanishing act by all four only happens a few times in a lifetime—every century, there are about 20 such alignments. The last such event prior to last week's was back in the 1980's; the next one won't happen until 2019. This event was not only observed on September 2nd by Chabot Space & Science Center astronomer Conrad Jung, but also in 1913 by then Chabot Observatory director Charles Burckhalter.

When Galileo took his newly made telescope and became the first person in history to look at Jupiter through the new invention, he saw three star-like points of light positioned around Jupiter, roughly on a common line that passed through the planet. At first he thought they might be stars, but on subsequent nights he observed that not only did these "stars" follow Jupiter's own movement through space, they changed position relative to each other. This led to Galileo's hypothesis that these were satellites in orbit around Jupiter.

The rest is history (oh, and lifelong house arrest for Galileo for suggesting that there was something in the Universe that didn't revolve directly around the Earth…).

I'm sure that if Galileo had first looked at Jupiter on one of these rare nights and saw no moons, he would certainly have discovered them the next time he looked at Jupiter—so maybe it wouldn't have changed the unfolding of historical events much. But I wonder which would have been more surprising to him: seeing the moons on the first look, or observing them to appear out of nowhere after the initial observation of a solitary Jupiter….

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The Crab Nebula as seen through Chabot Space & Science Center’s 8-inch refracting telescope, Leah. Image: Conrad Jung, Chabot Space & Science Center

What's the Crab Nebula? Astronomy enthusiasts are very familiar with this celestial object, or at least become so very quickly after entering the world of space. It's a supernova remnant—a torn and tortured cloud of gases expanding outward into space, the aftermath of a supernova explosion that happened almost a thousand years ago in the constellation Taurus. In fact, as I write this blog, the age of the Crab Nebula is exactly 955 years and 40 days.

How do we know with such precision when this former star went supernova? The answer, as always in science, is careful observation! The explosion of the star was witnessed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers—and possibly sky watchers of the American Southwest—who carefully observed and recorded the event. The explosion took place on July 4th, 1054 CE.

Seven hundred years later, a century after the invention of the telescope, the Crab Nebula was discovered in the same spot—first in 1731 by John Bevis, then again by Charles Messier in 1758 (August 28, in fact—the date of this blog posting!). Messier ran across it while searching for Halley's Comet, and at first mistook it for a comet. This was the reason that he began compiling his famous Messier catalog of "fuzzy" objects: a wall of mug shots of unusual suspects that resembled, but were imposters of, comets. He began his catalog with Messier 1 (M1), the Crab Nebula.

Messier 1 got its nickname of the Crab from a drawing made by observer Lord Rosse in 1844.
Today, the Crab Nebula is an expanding cloud of gas and some dust spanning 10 light years, or 60 trillion miles. The cloud is still expanding at a speed of about 1,800 kilometers per second—a speed that would get you to the Moon in just under 4 minutes! At its center is the collapsed remnant of the dead star's core, which has become the incredibly small and dense object known as a neutron star.

So why did the Crab Nebula spark my interest in astronomy? I have a specific memory of being at a summer camp and engaging in a craft activity where we cut out the pictures from a bunch of astronomy calendars and made frames and matting to display them in. I selected a few of my favorite images, which included the Dumbbell Nebula (a planetary nebula), the Veil Nebula (another supernova remnant), and, of course, the Crab. Of all these stunning astrophotos, it was the Crab that stuck the longest in my mind and on my bedroom wall, and impelled me to get my first subscription to Astronomy Magazine, and eventually my first telescope. Sometimes, our lives are guided by stars….

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The Hubble Space Telescope being serviced by Space Shuttle
Atlantis astronauts in May 2009. Credit: NASA

Galileo's telescope had a magnification of only about 27x, allowing him to see that Venus has phases like the Moon, Jupiter has four large moons of its own, Saturn does not appear as a simple disk but has unusual "projections" to either side, and the Milky Way contains far more stars than is apparent to the naked eye. And though these are features that can be seen through the least powerful home telescopes today, Galileo's observations changed the way we look at the universe.

Hubble has done the same thing, but on a modern scale of magnitude. Not a large telescope by the standards of ground-based behemoths like Keck in Hawaii (Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter), Hubble's "edge" is it's location in space, orbiting the Earth over 300 miles high, outside of our atmosphere. Particularly in its earlier days before ground based telescopes were using adaptive optics techniques to compensate for atmospheric distortion, Hubble's vision on the universe was unparalleled in its clarity.

Here's is a recap of a few of the many big discoveries Hubble has made possible:

Dark Energy: By accurately measuring the distance and velocity of distant supernovae, over a large range of distances, Hubble has refined out knowledge of the rate of expansion of the universe–leading to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating, contrary to what was expected. Scientists suggest the existence of a mysterious "dark energy" throughout the universe that exerts an antigravitational repulsive pressure on the cosmos.

Age of the Universe: Since Edwin Hubble (for whom the Space Telescope was named) discovered that the universe is expanding, astronomers have been trying to determine how long ago the expansion began–how long ago the "starting gun" of the Big Bang was fired, and thus the beginning of the universe. Through precise observations with the Hubble, astronomers in recent years have been able to peg it between 12 and 14 billion years. (Most recently, observations made with the WMAP mission have honed that down to 13.7 billion years, give or take 0.13 billion.)

Supermassive Blackholes: Hubble found the clues that point to the existence of "supermassive" blackholes at the heart of maybe most–or every–galaxy. The Milky Way's own central blackhole has a mass equivalent to four million Suns.

Stellar Dust Disks: Before the first extrasolar planets were actually detected, Hubble observations revealed that flat disks of dust encircling young and developing star systems–aka "protoplanetary disks"–is commonplace. This has given us a glimpse at what our own solar system may have looked like before the planets formed.

It has been seven years since the last Hubble servicing mission, with another servicing scheduled a few years ago cancelled in the wake of the Columbia disaster. Several failing systems will be repaired or replaced this time, and other instruments are receiving upgrades that will make Hubble more powerful than ever in its declining years.

This mission to service the Hubble will be the last. Since NASA is retiring the Space Shuttle fleet after 2010, we will no longer have a space vehicle large enough to carry upgrade and replacement equipment to and from the Hubble. After that, the next new big space-based descendent of Galileo's spyglass will be the James Webb. Stay tuned…

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The Vernal Equinox, where the Sun crosses the Celestial
Equator (red line) on the first day of Spring (March 20/21).
Credit: Space.com/Starry Night

"Can you tell me about the upcoming beginning of the Age of Aquarius?" said the voice on the phone. "I heard that it starts this Saturday…"

Now, I get a lot of phone calls and emails from people with astronomy and sky related questions. Very often it's something like, "What was that thing that tried to land in my front yard yesterday evening?!" or, "Is it true that Mars will be closer to the Earth this weekend than it has been in a gazillion years?" I've even had one or two asking if it's true that the world is ending in 2012.

Okay, I'm embellishing a bit. Those are all very good questions, and I do my best to provide a science-based answer — like, "Venus tried to land in your yard," or "The Mars extra-close encounter happened in 2003… and it had only been less than a century since the previous time," or, "We'll just have to wait for 2012 to roll around to find out…"

As for the Age of Aquarius question, that got me to wondering. I've always regarded this issue as astrology-related more than astronomy, but I also realized there are physical underpinnings to the definition. So I fired up Google and clarified some of the details for myself. The first thing I learned is that, among astrologers at least, there is little agreement on precisely when the Age of Aquarius is supposed to begin (or if it's already begun). Different astrologers at different times and from different parts of the world have tried to define this, resulting in multiple schools of thought on the subject.

But from a purely astronomical standpoint, the delineation of these Ages is based on a natural physical cycle, just as a year is defined by Earth's motion around the Sun and a day is defined by Earth's rotation on its axis.

An astrological Age (aka "Great Year") is determined by the position of the Vernal Equinox — at least by one of the schools of thought… The Vernal Equinox is that point in the sky occupied by the Sun when it crosses the Celestial Equator heading into the Northern Hemisphere. So, you can think of the Vernal Equinox as a distinct point on the sky (and it's easy to locate on the first day of Spring: Just look at the Sun — I take that back: DON'T look at the Sun!)

But the position of the Vernal Equinox shifts over time due to a cycle of change in the orientation of the Earth's rotation. The Earth spins like a top, but also like a top it undergoes a gyrating motion, called precession. One complete gyration takes about 26,000 years — so all of the points in the sky defined by Earth's spinning (the celestial poles and equator, and, yes, the Vernal Equinox) move around the sky over 26,000 years.

At this moment, the Vernal Equinox is in the constellation Pisces — at least, within the region of the sky defined by modern astronomers as encompassing all the stars of Pisces. So, if one were to acknowledge the constellation boundaries according to modern astronomers, then one would say that we are in the Age of Pisces still (and, by the same definition of constellation boundaries, the Vernal Equinox will remain in Pisces until about the year 2600, when it will cross the border into Aquarius.)

However, there is little agreement among different groups of astrologers on where one constellation ends and another begins–and to my knowledge none of them have adopted the modern astronomical boundaries.

So, when does the Age of Aquarius begin? Depends on who you talk to….

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Depiction of Galileo demonstrating his astronomical telescope.

(Almost as famous as this act of opening our eyes to wonders we'd never witnessed, Galileo was tried by the Inquisition for pointing out that there were more things in heaven than were imagined by Church doctrine–but that's another story altogether…)

It's an intriguing fact that, beyond the Sun merely being a bright disk, the Moon a not-so-bright and slightly mottled disk, the stars pinpoints of light and the planets pinpoints of light that move, everything we have learned about the universe and the objects in it we have learned in the last four centuries, since the invention of the telescope and Galileo's putting it to it's most famous use: astronomy.

Galileo saw on the Moon craters, mountains, and valleys, and likened the "uneven, rough… depressions and bulges" to Earth's geographical features. Venus was revealed to undergo lunar-like phases, which provided controversial insight into the layout of the Solar System. Jupiter had four small "star-like" moons that moved around it–which defied Church doctrine holding that everything in the universe goes around the Earth. And Saturn possessed jug-handle-like protrusions, whatever those were!

It may be difficult to imagine what Galileo was feeling when he made these discoveries of things we take for granted. How exciting to peer through that celestial peephole and discover that the Moon is another world, and that there are worlds out there that had never been seen or imagined before. Sure, new discoveries about Mars keep rolling in, and we're finding a new extrasolar planet about every month–but the excitement about these discoveries is tempered by the fact that we already suspected things like these as possibilities. For Galileo, the magnified astronomical sky was practically a blank canvass.

Back to IYA 2009–what's going on? Who's promoting this, and what is being done to celebrate?

NASA is promoting it, and many different organizations (including Chabot and the Eastbay Astronomical Society) are participating in a number of ways: star parties, special programs, special events, and good old fashioned put-your-eye-to-this-telescope-and-gawk public observing activities.
Honestly, there's nothing like looking through a telescope–and it doesn't have to be a large one. I don't doubt that I first became inspired into astronomy when, as a child, my family would take me to Chabot Observatory to look through the telescopes.

When the new Chabot Space & Science Center reopened the telescopes after the move to our present site, I found all of the childhood wonder flooded back when I put my eye to the eyepiece to regard Saturn. There's an excitement that simply can't be achieved by looking at photographs. You just have to experience it for yourself, as Galileo did four centuries ago…

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MESSENGER's color filter imaging capability reveals variations
in color on Mercury too subtle for the human eye.
Photo credit: NASA/MESSENGER

Did MESSENGER find anything new, since its first flyby back in January? Here are a few highlights:

• Prominent "ejecta" rays streaking out from several large craters–previously revealed only by radar imaging from Earth, now photographed for the first time.

• 30% more of Mercury's largely unexplored surface than had been revealed by the Mariner 10 flybys in the 70's and MESSEGNER's own first flyby last January (spacecraft–namely Mariner 10 and MESSENGER–have now imaged 95% of Mercury's surface).

• "Hyper-color" (my own word) imaging of surface features that reveal variations in color too subtle for the human eye to notice, providing information on soil and rock composition.

I'm a planet junkie–and Mercury has always had a special place in my imagination. One might think of Mercury as the least interesting planet, in our Solar System as well as among dozens of "exoplanet" systems yet discovered. After all, it's a small, dry, cratered, and airless lump of rock and dust, resembling for the most part Earth's Moon. Consider, however, the point of view of someone who's favorite place on Earth is dry, dusty Death Valley, and my enamorment might not come as such a surprise.

In my imagination I see towering cliffs, enormous, deep crevasses, wide, flat dusty plains, bright brights in sunlit patches and dark darks in shadow….

But it's really its differences from Earth that make Mercury such an appealing exotic vision. Being where it is, 36 million miles from the Sun (about a third the Earth-Sun distance), the sunlight striking the Mercurian landscape is six times brighter–imagine that! And not just the visible light spectrum, but all the wavelengths of light the Sun puts out are free to impact Mercury's surface, unimpeded by an atmosphere: infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and potent burst of gamma rays rain down intensely on the planet's plains, mountains, and craters.

Speaking of the Sun, its behavior in Mercury's skies is, to say the least, zany. Mercury orbits the Sun in about 88 days (Earth days), but rotates so slowly that a single Mercurian day (the time from one high noon to the next) is about 115 Earth days. Not only does that mean sun-up to sun-down lasts roughly a couple of months, but that Mercury's orbital motion has a greater effect than its rotation on the Sun's apparent motion through its sky. The complicated relationship between Mercury's year and its day also causes the Sun to go "retrograde" at times–that is, periodically halt its progress from one horizon to the other and temporarily go in the opposite direction.

So, our prodigal vacationer MESSENGER has its itinerary straight: a climate with the brightest, warmest sunlight, pristine landscapes, long sunny days, and big skies that perform tricks for its amusement. Now, if only there was a beach…

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