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by abridges6523 1014 days ago
That’s a good link. Sidereal time is interesting. Like a Mercury day is longer than it’s year. Wild
1 comments

This intrigued me, so I looked it up. Sadly, your memory doesn’t seem to be correct. Mercury’s day is 59 earth days and its year is 88 earth days.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/planet-mercury.html

There are two different definitions of "day". The sidereal day is the time it takes for a body to complete a full 360° rotation about its axis. The synodic day is the time between success zenith passings of the parent body. If the body rotates in the same direction as its orbits, the synodic day is longer than the sidereal day; if its rotation is in the opposite direction, the sidereal day is longer.

On Earth, the synodic day is 24 hours long, and the sidereal day is about 4 minutes shorter. In the case of Mercury, the sidereal day is 59 Earth days and the synodic day is 176 Earth days. Note that the synodic day is the one we on Earth use to define the length of a day for timekeeping purposes--it's a lot easier to measure synodic time than sidereal time.

It depends on the definition of a “day” that you use, but due to Mercury’s elliptical orbit sunrises and sunsets are weird. [1] It takes 59 Earth days for the planet to revolve once around its axis, but from the surface it takes 176 Earth days to observe the sun making a complete circuit of the sky.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/mercury/in-depth.amp

This is the weirdest thing at that link:

> But when Mercury is moving fastest in its elliptical orbit around the Sun (and it is closest to the Sun), each rotation is not accompanied by sunrise and sunset like it is on most other planets. The morning Sun appears to rise briefly, set, and rise again from some parts of the planet's surface.