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Astronomy on Mercury is the sky as viewed from the planet Mercury. ... This is due to the high eccentricity of Mercury's orbit around the Sun. [1]
Mercury's orbit is inclined by 7 degrees to the plane of Earth's orbit (the ecliptic), the largest of all eight known solar planets. [112] As a result, transits of Mercury across the face of the Sun can only occur when the planet is crossing the plane of the ecliptic at the time it lies between Earth and the Sun, which is in May or November.
The orbit of the planet Mercury lies interior to that of the Earth, and thus it can come into an inferior conjunction with the Sun. When Mercury is near the node of its orbit, it passes through the orbital plane of the Earth. If an inferior conjunction occurs as Mercury is passing through its orbital node, the planet can be seen to pass across ...
Animated explanation of the mechanics of a retrograde orbit of a planet Archived 2013-10-05 at the Wayback Machine, University of South Wales; NASA: Mars retrograde motion; Double sunrises, 3DS Max Animation – illustrating the case of Mercury (the animation of an imaginary apparent retrograde motion of the Sun as seen from Earth begins at 1:35)
Following the arrival of MESSENGER in orbit in 2011, these six quadrangles were mapped and renamed. [2] The base mosaic used in the new maps was produced with orbital images by the MESSENGER Team and released by NASA’s Planetary Data System on March 8, 2013. This global mosaic includes 100% coverage of Mercury’s surface.
Transit of Mercury on November 8, 2006 with sunspots #921, 922, and 923 The perihelion precession of Mercury. Under Newtonian physics, an object in an (isolated) two-body system, consisting of the object orbiting a spherical mass, would trace out an ellipse with the center of mass of the system at a focus of the ellipse.
For a satellite orbiting the Earth directly above the Equator, the plane of the satellite's orbit is the same as the Earth's equatorial plane, and the satellite's orbital inclination is 0°. The general case for a circular orbit is that it is tilted, spending half an orbit over the northern hemisphere and half over the southern.
Mercury – smallest and innermost planet in the Solar System. Its orbital period (about 88 Earth days) is less than any other planet in the Solar System. Seen from Earth, it appears to move around its orbit in about 116 days. It has no known natural satellites. It is named after the Roman deity Mercury, the messenger to the gods.