Mercury in color from MESSENGER

Filed under best of, pretty pictures, global views, amateur image processing, Mercury, MESSENGER

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As it departed from its second flyby of Mercury, MESSENGER snapped a color mosaic of the planet using its wide-angle camera; this version is a four-frame (2x2) mosaic of images captured through the red, green, and blue filters. Mercury's color variations are very subtle. This view consisted almost entirely of territory not previously seen from a spacecraft and included a spectacular set of rays radial to a small impact crater located near Mercury's north pole.

NASA / JHUAPL / CIW / color mosaic by Jason Perry

Copyright holder: Jason Perry

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about October 6, 2008