What colour is Mercury?

[Ortolan]

I'm working on an 8k x 4k mercury texture at the moment. The Mariner imagery I'm using is in greyscale. Is Mercury a grey ball of rock like our moon or does it have some colour to it? The current mercury texture distributed with celestia is a golden colour like the NASA photo I've seen of mercury taken from Earth's surface. I'm not sure if this photo was true-colour or not though. Any ideas?

[Guest]

I'm pretty certain that Mercury is a gray ball of rock . . . The golden color of the current texture is not correct, and I've been meaning to change it. I suspect that the author of the texture just gave it that color to make it look like a hot place.

--Chris

[Axel]

Hi,

as with most astronomic images of planetary bodies they were rel hirez greyscale images combined with false color lowrez images, which were taken thru a non-standarized filter.

There's the very same discussion about Mars' true surface- and especially sky-colors. A lot of ppl suggest that Nasa's images were rather dull and were enhanced for telegenity/by accident.

I have once seen a very washed out low rez color image of Mercury and it was showing the same basic bown/ocre color, but it's saturation was 25% of the current texture.

That's seems probable to me given the fact that Mecury contains large ammounts of iron, while it's surface is probably the usual silicates mixed with a little iron.

I would further predict that large impact crates and their ejacta might have a higher percentage of iron resulting in a diff - browner color.

Take care,
Axel

[Rassilon]

Guess its time for another probe...

[erostosthenes]

iron by itself is not orange. that is iron oxide or more commonly known as ferric oxide. it's common enough on earth since we have oxygen in our atmosphere and organisms capable of fixing it into rocks containing iron or copper (which only turns green when oxidized). mercury is much too close to the sun, and its gravity is much too weak to hold oxygen at its surface, so ferric oxide (at least at the visible surface) is an impossibility. now iron may still turn orange if it comes into contact with various sorts of salts. if so it forms ferrous sulfate, but this is also unlikely on a very baked mercury.

[Axel]

Hi erostosthenes,

iron by itself is not orange. that is iron oxide...

Well, I guess we don't have any oxygen left on Mars. However there was likely some water back a few hundred million years or so.

So we have large ammounts of ferro oxide and currently no oxygen.

So I'd say, even if Mercury lost it's atmoshere right after it's formation
there might be a possibility for some ferro oxide in it's past.

Question is how much and and where

Take care,
Axel

[Ortolan]

OK, I've finished my 8k texture for Mercury and made a 2k jpeg preview texture:
http://www.skullcave.com/celestia/mercury2k.jpg
Please try out this texture and let me know if there's any errors that I've missed that need to be fixed. Once I've got some feedback on it I'll produce an 8k & 4k DXT texture and make them available for download. Thanks.

[Rassilon]

Very nice!!...btw did you use flexify to produce the squashing effect at the poles? If so what was your specs? tex size and settings in flex...I never can get that thing to work right for me...

[Ortolan]

It's actually from Mariner imagery that was already in mercator projection, so I didn't need to use flexify. All I needed to do was clone the data (the texture only covered ~40% of the planet originally) to fill in the gaps and remove some noise artefacts.

[Rassilon]

Well its still a job well done...One of these days Ill figure out the best specs to use with flexify....

[Darkmiss]

Good work.
looks great and works very well, thank you

But, surley, there must be some colour on Mercury.

[billybob884]

link not working...

[Psykotik]

You'd better trying http://www.skullcave.com/celestia/ and making your choice...

[billybob884]

thanks sooo much!