Dramatic new pictures have revealed the unseen side of Mercury in detailed images taken from a Nasa spacecraft orbiting the planet. Astronomers saw the "dark side" of Mercury for the very first time when the spacecraft flew within 125 miles of the planet's surface and took 1,200 high resolution images.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=508772&in_page_id=1965

Awesome.

Yeah, fantastic images.

BTW, The first image was taken when the spacecraft was 27,000 kilometres away.
The second image shows the crater Vivaldi.

I know. I get SO excited when I see this stuff. :xctd:

It's just so amazing.

The NASA Channel was showing this, looks somewhat like our moon. Its can be a hard planet to locate with the naked eye because it follows the sun so closely. Venus on the other hand outshines everything in the night sky but the moon.

The NASA Channel was showing this, looks somewhat like our moon. Its can be a hard planet to locate with the naked eye because it follows the sun so closely. Venus on the other hand outshines everything in the night sky but the moon.

True. This is my fave pic:

http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/cyberspace/planets/venus/images/venus_magellan.jpg

True. This is my fave pic:

http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/cyberspace/planets/venus/images/venus_magellan.jpg

been to that planetarium it is a good one

Awesome!!!!

Mercury is an easy target for amateur astronomers tomorrow evening.

IMAGE (http://img503.imageshack.us/img503/41/mercury200811816h02mif5.gif) (6kb, 792 x 554)

Mercury at 16:03 UT, 18th January 2008.

Here is the Messenger mission homepage at NASA - lots of great pics and info!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html

Star-gazer. When I worked shift work and had to get up at 4am, I saw Mercury many times as at certain times of the year it is low in the sky just before sunrise.

The annoying thing about Venus, other than being featureless is that as it is closer to the Sun than we are, it goes through phases like the Moon does (which even a good pair of binoculars show) but the more we see of it, the further away it gets so it never seems to change that much in brightness.