Mercury - 3 years of celestial motion

This simulated sequence of daily images shows the position of Mercury at sunset over 3 years, looking southwest from the California coast. Mercury is known for its quick motion throughout the celestial sphere due to its tight orbit around the Sun, which only has a period of 88 days. So, during an Earth year, it will go around the Sun about 4 times. Since the Sun’s position on the horizon also changes daily, the two motions when combined make for some beautiful scribbling in the sky. Of course, we can only see Mercury from Earth during those special times when it’s still above the horizon after the Sun has set. But, with a little help, we can imagine what he’s up to even when we can’t see him.
This was rendered in OpenSpace:
www.openspacep...
Sunset times were calculated using astral 2.2 for python
pypi.org/proje...
for a location at 36.549 N, 121.2633 N.

[@abock03]

Mercury's got the moves like Jagger