Just as the element mercury can slip through your fingers, the Planet Mercury makes it's swift appearance in the evening sky then slips out of view quickly. It is the fastest planet. Takes only 88 days to orbit the Sun! In a few days, May 7, Mercury will appear to move backward against the background of stars for about 24 days, this is known as
retrograde.Some of you may have heard the phrase "Mercury in Retrograde"??
This is an actual phenomena of Mercury's orbit as viewed from Earth and it's coming up lickidy split!
How to Find Mercury:
Check out this elusive planet right after sunset.
Look directly west and you will see an orangish blinking star low in the sky. This is Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus the Bull.
Draw a line, in the 4 o'clock direction from Aldebaran until your eye catches another point of light. This will be Mercury!
It sets pretty fast after sunset and is so low, that clouds or some of the islands can obscure it, depending on your vantage point.
Here is a great article from UniverseToday.com explaining Mercury in Retrograde and the times it happens in 2009.
Ancient people have known about the planets since we were able to look up. Some stars were brighter than the rest, and seemed to move across the sky from night to night. These moving stars were known as planets, and there were 5: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. But the movements of the planets were puzzling to ancient astronomers. Some times the planets would slow down, go backwards, and then go forwards again. When a planet goes backwards, it’s called retrograde, and one of the best planets for this is Mercury. Let’s examine Mercury retrograde.
In ancient times, people thought the Earth was the center of the Universe, and all objects in the night sky orbited around us. One complication of this model was the planets which took these very predictable retrograde paths in their orbit. If the planets were orbiting the Earth, why would they go backwards? Why would Mercury retrograde? They developed elaborate models where the planets followed a spiraling path around the Earth to account for this retrograde motion.
It wasn’t until Nicolaus Copernicus developed his Sun-centered model of the Solar System that the bizarre retrograde motion of Mercury and the rest of the planets finally made sense. The Earth is just another planet, and they’re all orbiting the Sun together. The retrograde motion of Mercury and the other planets is due to our relative positions in orbit.
So let’s understand retrograde motion, and look at Mercury retrograde in particular. The motion of the planets around the Sun follow the right-hand rule. Hold your right hand out, make a fist and stick the thumb up. The direction of the thumb points in the direction of the Sun’s northern pole. The curve of the fingers indicates the direction all the planets orbit around the Sun. Mercury moves faster than the Earth as it travels around the Sun; however, Mercury has a highly elliptical orbit, so the speed of its orbit changes. When Mercury is furthest from the Sun, it’s at the slowest point in its orbit, and this gives the Earth a chance to “catch up”. Imagine you’re driving next to a car in the freeway which is speeding up and slowing down. It’s still going down the highway at a high speed, but it seems to be going back and forth compared to you. That’s Mercury retrograde.
Astrologers seem to think that retrograde motion is an unlucky or bad situation because it goes against a planet’s natural movements. Of course, the planet isn’t really changing its motions at all, it’s only our perspective of the planet that’s changing. Furthermore, at any one time, 40% of the outer planets are in retrograde motion anyway. Something’s almost always in retrograde. So when is Mercury going to be in retrograde? Here are some Mercury retrograde dates for the next few years.
Mercury Retrograde 2009
- January 11-31
- May 6-20
- September 6-29
- December 26-January 15, 2010
Debris ring around naked eye star, Fomalhaut, showing location of planet 
