A little later, standing on the open hillside below the hawking bats, they watched for the dim planet that showed at last low down in the west between the sunset and the dark.
He said, "It is as if Mercury had a finger on me tonight, Mary. It's no good my trying to sleep tonight except in the Lotus Room."
Her arm tightened in his. "Mercury?" she said. It is another world. It is too far."
But he laughed and said, "Nothing is too far."
E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
Mercury and Venus as seen from Idaho, earlier this year
Image by Kris Hazelbaker
The above passage from The Worm Ouroboros is one of the most beautiful accounts of naked eye planetary observation I have ever read. It never fails to move me, especially after an evening like tonight. I had driven out to a nearby civic center that has a large open space behind it with a relatively clear western horizon. I knew that Mercury would be putting in his best evening appearance for the entire year, and despite the oppressive heat and clouds of mosquitoes, I walked out into the middle of that field and drank in the steadily darkening sky, which ran the spectrum from brilliant pink on the horizon to yellow at the tree line, up to pale blue just above the treetops to a deep blue where brilliant Venus reigned supreme, reminding me of Edmund Spenser's description of her:
Fayre childe of beauty, glorious lampe of Love
That all the host of heaven in rankes doost lead,
And guydest lovers through the nightes dread,
How chearfully thou lookest from above.
(Epithalamion, lines 588-589)
(If you have never heard Ralph Vaughan Williams' heartbreakingly beautiful setting of these words to music, you owe it to yourself to listen to it, Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKaAtuEe_sQ Begin at 20 minutes 12 seconds in, and be sure to not miss the full chorus breaking in at 21 minutes 34 seconds.)
The sun had set at 8:30, but I couldn't see anything of Mercury, even through my 8X56 binos, until 9:04 - pretty much right where I expected to find him (a little lower, maybe). The humid atmosphere was distorting the view a bit. Mercury was a distinct yellow instead of its usual pristine white, and it actually twinkled. (Planets aren't supposed to do that!) I hadn't brought along my telescope, so both planets remained glittering points of light.
By 9:12, Mercury had brightened (or, more accurately, the sky had darkened) to the point where he could be seen naked eye, albeit only intermittently, and with averted vision. But by that time, I was being eaten alive, and decided to beat a retreat to the land of air conditioning, glancing up at Jupiter on the way to the car.
Mercury and Venus as seen from North Carolina
Image by Nicolas Holshouser
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