Mercury's Hidden Side Observed Options

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An ambitious astronomer takes advantage of a rare opportunity to photograph the hemisphere of Mercury we almost never get to see via telepresence in Chile. Article here.

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Can't find any pics yet...assuming that he's working on publishing his results. Don't expect much, though; pretty much every ground-based optical image of Mercury I've seen looks like a bad pic of Mars with nothing evident but gross albedo features.

However, he did acquire something like 300,000 images, so maybe image stacking & other techniques will bring out some good stuff. Lots of data-crunching needed, though.

Hell, here's a wild thought: does he need some help? Some of the incredibly talented imagesmiths among us might be able to simplify the process considerably; why not contact him & ask? He's a state university prof, can't imagine that he has an abundance of resources...

[Rob Pinnegar]

Hell, here's a wild thought: does he need some help? Some of the incredibly talented imagesmiths among us might be able to simplify the process considerably; why not contact him & ask? He's a state university prof, can't imagine that he has an abundance of resources...

That's a nice sentiment -- but if he's working on publishing it, which seems very likely, I think he'd probably be nervous about turning the data over to a bunch of Internet people.

Also, in a publication, he would have to be able to describe in detail all of the data processing steps -- which generally would mean no use of "black box" commercial processing software. (There are people out there who write their own processing code in Fortran or C because they don't even trust Matlab -- and although I *do* trust Matlab, I can understand this.)