The Planet Mercury Near Dusk May 1st, 2008, Revelstoke, BC

Image of Mercury captured less than 10 minutes before it dissapeared behind the mountains west of Revelstoke. It is the most elusive planet to photograph and I got REAL lucky with this one. Surface detail can be seen in addition to its phase!!!!

It is particularily tricky to image due to chromatic and atmospheric distortion because it sits so low in the horizon. At the time it was captured, it was roughly 12 degrees above the horizon.

This required several attempts with processing in Registax, plus an RGB decomposition technique to adjust for the chromatic and atmospheric distortions present in the initial raw images.