-Sappho (circa 580 B.C.)
Copernicus never saw Mercury? What follows are some of my quick photos of Mercury which serve to prove that I'm a better astronomer than Copernicus.
Well...not exactly: you see, while Copernicus never bothered to write explicitly in his journals that he did indeed see Mercury (I suppose he was much more modest than me ), he almost certainly did see Mercury! Further, he did extremely complex mathematical calculations which involved all he known planets--including the path of Mercury!
He did write in one of his works that were he was there was lots of fog in the mornings and evenings and lots of tall trees, etc. that made viewing Mercury difficult in Poland. "Difficult" as in annoying or hard, but not impossible. Remember, whenever Copernicus was trying to view Mercury (or any other star/planet) it wasn't for pleasure-he needed precise measurements so he could work on mathematical theories of planetary motion such as slight trepidations (oscillations) caused by gravitational forces and their orbits, etc.
So, what did Copernicus do while in the foggy forests of his native Poland? He just wrote letters to his friends in other places who sent him measurements of their observations of Mercury. He then went inside his house and did maths. Very groundbreaking, difficult, awesome maths.
Even with a smartphone, calendar app and plenty of email alerts to notify me exactly when and where to look for Mercury it took me two years of trying! Mercury hugs our sun. Most of the year it's hidden in the blinding sunlight of day. However, a four to five times a year it strays just barely away from our sun so that you can aim a telescope at it (Mercury, not the sun) and watch it. You get a week to get it early in the morning and then wait months later to see it at sunset (meaning, literally like a few minutes after sunset).
I'm not a morning person, I sleep until 10am most days. So the morning appearances were ruled out. I had to wait for evening sunset Mercury appearances. The first few times I missed even seeing it as the 'bright star' everyone else (seemingly) on Earth was marveling at. I was at work (in a library) and grabbed my HUGE Konus 20x80 binoculars and ran out the front door:
So what did I see? Well, here's the thing: it was the same night that the International Space Station was flying overhead so everyone in the parking lot (an annoying large amount of people) were asking me about the ISS. I got so flustered (I'm shy) that I forgot I was using binoculars (which show a normal right-side-up image) and not a regular telescope (which shows an upside-down image). I kept going from Saturn up to Venus instead of Venus down to Saturn and a little further down to Mercury. It would have been so easy to see had I just swiveled down instead of up.
Another time I had everything lined up and just as the sky started to dim just a tad as our sun dipped below the horizon: boom, I noticed a HUGE tree limb in the way. I big tree, so I jumped in my pickup truck and drove about a mile away and STILL was blocked by other trees. Normally I would have been irritated but I just laughed it off, "now I know what Copernicus felt like".
Finally, over a year later, I was able to see Mercury. I watched it for over half an hour! I used my big binoculars and it looked like a bloated, fat dot the color of pinky-orange Neapolitan ice cream:
There it is in the photo above. Dead center, the orangey-pink dot poking through the clouds. I took this picture by sticking my cellphone up to one of the eyepieces on my binoculars (which were on a tripod at the time).
After seeing it in my telescope I moved to my 8" Zhumell reflector telescope. What I saw was pretty amazing: it looked like the old Apple Computer logo: a three-color-striped blob with a bite taken out of it! Mercury goes through phases like our Moon and the planet Venus. Full round circle, mushed oval, crescent horn sliver, etc. At first I thought my telescope was broken, but no: being so low in the horizon made its light refract through the atmosphere (and smog) and get all distorted color-wise, and it wasn't in a full-round phase at the time.
I was so happy after my two year hunt that I forgot to take photos.
Here's one I took recently--it's a casual shot. Why? Mercury was right next to Venus so it was extremely easy to view. I grabbed a better eyepiece, put it in the telescope and just as I was about to look I noticed a wall of clouds coming: so I just peacefully observed instead of rushing to take a photo in the few seconds I had. Here's the crumby pic I did manage when Mercury was in a fuller phase and higher up in the sky:
Due to the bloat of Mercury, I'm thinking the above picture was taken with a 3mm or 9mm eyepiece in my 8" telescope. Anyway, that was at 6:30pm January 12, 2015. It was 19 degrees outside! So I went back in due to the cold and clouds. I was happy.
Then at 9:30pm I ventured back out and was treated to The Comet Lovejoy just below the Pleiades! Each night during about a week-and-a-half of observations Comet Lovejoy moved closer and closer to the Pleiades. It looked like a hazy grey blob, possibly on one of the nights I may have sensed some slight green color-but no tail. Too much light pollution in Metro Detroit.
Anyway, that's why I started this post with the Sapho poem mentioning the Pleiades: it paved the way for Comet Lovejoy after viewing Mercury earlier in the night, along with Jupiter, Jupiter's four Galilean Moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto; our own Moon, Venus and even the Orion Nebula (which was so bright it was visible with the naked eye as a blue smear).
Not a bad night. Not a bad night at all...
