Evening Mercury

StarDate

If you ever visit the planet Mercury, take along your old eclipse glasses. They’re not for looking at the Sun – you might need something even darker for that. Instead, you might want them just to see your way across the planet itself. Mercury is so close to the Sun that sunlight is more than 10 times more intense than on Earth.

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun – an average of about 40 percent of Earth’s distance. But Mercury’s orbit is the most lopsided of any of the Sun’s major planets. So when Mercury is closest to the Sun, sunlight is almost two-and-a-half times as intense as when the planet is farthest.

All of that solar energy makes Mercury the second-hottest planet – only Venus is hotter. At the equator, temperatures hit about 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t beat the heat. Mercury doesn’t have an atmosphere to circulate heat around the planet. So nighttime temperatures drop to almost 300 below zero. And the bottoms of some craters at the poles never see the Sun at all. They stay cold enough to preserve big deposits of ice – perfect places to beat the heat on a scorching planet.

Mercury is just peeking into view in the evening twilight. It looks like a fairly bright star, quite low in the west as night falls. The view is better from southern locations. So while you might not see it at all from Minneapolis, you shouldn’t have any trouble from San Antonio or Miami.

Script by Damond Benningfield