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Mercury Visible After Sunset
Posted on Mar 17, 2011 03:51:06 PM | William Cooke | 4 Comments    |


NASA's Mercury MESSENGER spacecraft is preparing to insert itself into orbit tonight, Mar. 17. While you may not have a seat, you can still see Mercury tonight after sunset from the comfort of planet Earth.


Close-up image of a portion of Mercury’s surface, captured on a MESSENGER fly-by
on Oct. 6, 2008. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/
Carnegie Institution of Washington)

The key to seeing Mercury is having an unobstructed view of the horizon in the sunrise or sunset direction. You should look for Mercury about 30 to 40 minutes after sunset, as soon as the sky begins to darken.

For more viewing information about Mercury and other skywatching opportunities, visit: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/ataglance

Keep up on the latest progess of Mercury MESSENGER at NASA's MESSENGER mission page: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html

and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Website: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/

 

Tags : MESSENGER, Mercury  

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4 Comments so far ( Post your own )
4 On Jun 17, 2011 11:13:30 PM  andre ardhani  added a comment on your blog post. 

Dear Sir/Madam
i've wrote many articles about the planet nibiru, which will be crash to earth within 2012, kindly inform me about this matter (it is true or just hoax), thank you.

warmest regards,

Andre Ardhani

3 On Jul 29, 2011 02:02:28 AM  sara  added a comment on your blog post. 

nice post.. liked it very much..


---------
Sara

2 On Mar 18, 2011 06:27:44 AM  Dean  added a comment on your blog post. 

Maybe the positions of the pyramids of the Mayans will tell us about the coming of the mass object "NIBIRU";maybe when the pyramids aligned with Mar's similar structure that would be the signal that the object can now be seen by the naked eyes..........i'm wondering if there's already been a report that those similar structures have aligned...

1 On Mar 17, 2011 10:05:21 PM  Disappointed...  added a comment on your blog post. 

Just finished watching the Messenger live webcast... stupidest thing I have ever seen coming from NASA. Instead of showing the actual event, which, yes, would have been the doppler data and the actual mission control room, we got to see a bunch of videos made for little kids and endless self congratulatory speeches by the moderator and different aparatchicks.

Seriously, people... WHO CARES?

And what's the idea of having someone re-tell the events of the orbit insertion instead of actually showing it? Is that the new way of teaching science to the masses? Do it behind a curtain and then have somebody who has seen it show up and talk about it for three minutes?

You may have, by the way, noticed that by the time the actual event was over, many viewers were already gone...

I love NASA and I am all for giving you more money. BUT PLEASE, please, folks, stop wasting it on media events like these.

Show us the real thing and stop pretending that we are too stupid to understand what we you are doing there.

Because, you know, there are millions of us out here who have actual interest in you who are not.

Or maybe you are just too busy trying to find intelligent life in the universe to notice that it's right here, at the other end of your live feeds?

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