Mercury will be visible in the next few days, even with the naked eye, just before dawn. Astronomers say it, and the ephemeris confirm it: the best time to observe it will be between 4 and 7 November, when it will reach maximum western elongation, around 19 degrees from the Sun. In Italy (if you really want to) you can see it in the east, low on the horizon, around 6:30 in the morning, as long as the sky is clear and you have a little patience, which, today, is asking a lot, I would never be able to see a tube, never managed to see anything, not to mention in general that even the starry sky makes me anxious, knowing what it is and how much it tells us about our nothingness, which is why even when Nanni Bignami took me to the INAF Astronomical Observatory (of which he was President) a part of me felt uncomfortable as in a horror film (while the other part of me wanted to see everything, as in a horror film).
In any case, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center inform us that Mercury is an extreme planet: temperatures that oscillate from 430 degrees during the day to -180 at night, a very slow rotation (a day lasts 58.6 Earth days) and an iron core that occupies 85% of the diameter. On the surface, the planet shows signs of a violent volcanic past, so much so that a recent study by Geophysical Research Letters, conducted by the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, claims that ancient eruptions produced immense quantities of graphite which were then transformed, with the impact of meteorites, into billions of tons of diamonds. Mercury, in short, like a jewel hidden in the dark, literally covered in invisible diamonds, cool, right?
Yet, who really cares? Most of us live looking at screens, not skies. The planets move above us as they have done for billions of years and in the last ten we have been too busy scrolling on smartphones, and therefore Mercury, if anyone sees it, will see it there, perhaps animated by AI. The good thing is that Mercury was the messenger of the gods and today he wouldn’t even be able to send us a notification.
However, even I who am allergic to metaphysics, I have a completely metaphysical reason for watching it (metaphysics so to speak, conscious autosuggestion). Because I am obsessed not with the planet, but with the other Mercury: not the liquid metal (which has always fascinated me anyway, as a child I broke a lot of thermometers to let it out and play with, and even more so later, after seeing Terminator 2), the human Mercury: Freddie Mercury.
Messenger of the rock gods, the one who wanted to become a legend and actually became one, he is also the only one who didn’t like advertising but posed for Vogue, in 1984, to advertise diamonds, and diamonds were his favorite precious stones. He didn’t yet know that even under the name he had chosen for himself there were tons of diamonds. It seems like a good reason to try to look at the sky these nights: a diamond is forever, like Freddie.