Goodies from Mercury tomorrow

So, the first image from the MESSENGER flyby proper should arrive tomorrow morning: there was a bit of a delay because a problem with the Ulysses solar-polar observing spacecraft bumped MESSENGER off the big dish they were going to use. I hope it's nothing serious; Ulysses has been around for a while but it would be a pity to lose it now, just as the switchover to a new solar cycle happens.

Goodies from Mercury tonight

The mostly unrevealed (until now) face of Mercury.

It looks as Moonlike as ever, though those dark-rimmed craters in the Caloris Basin at upper right are peculiar. You can't tell that Caloris is a huge impact feature nearly as obviously as in the old Mariner 10 photos, where it was right on the edge of the sunlit hemisphere; I guess that's the effect of the high sun phase--the sun's shining down at a higher angle and the relief isn't as clear.

This is still just a single-filter monochrome image, so it doesn't answer a question I have concerning the color of Mercury. I always saw it depicted as Moonlike gray until recently, when there seems to have been a vogue for depicting it as more reddish-brown, but I'm not sure whether this is anything justified or is just people lifting images from each other.

Anyway, off to bed.