Starwatch: Mercury to reach farthest point from the sun
Trapped in its small orbit, Mercury never strays far from the sun, meaning it is usually lost to the light of dawn or dusk. An early start and an unobstructed view towards the east-north-east will be essential to making the sighting. The chart shows the view looking in this direction from London at 04.30 BST on Tuesday.If your line of sight is free from obstructions, the planet will become visible about a handspan above the horizon some time between 04.30 and 05.00.
- ▪Trapped in its small orbit, Mercury never strays far from the sun, meaning it is usually lost to the light of dawn or dusk.
- ▪An early start and an unobstructed view towards the east-north-east will be essential to making the sighting.
- ▪The chart shows the view looking in this direction from London at 04.30 BST on Tuesday.If your line of sight is free from obstructions, the planet will become visible about a handspan above the horizon some time between 04.30 and 05.00.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/03/starwatch-mercury-glimpse-of-solar-system-inner-world |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:00:41 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T05:10:42.783Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T05:10:42.783Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | NPLYeZqaCa3r · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Illustration: Guardian DesignView image in fullscreen Illustration: Guardian DesignStarwatchAstronomyStarwatch: Mercury to reach farthest point from the sunMorning sky offers rare opportunity for a glimpse at solar system’s innermost worldStuart ClarkMon 3 Aug 2026 01.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleThis week offers one of the better opportunities of the year to catch a glimpse of the solar system’s innermost world. Trapped in its small orbit, Mercury never strays far from the sun, meaning it is usually lost to the light of dawn or dusk.
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