Explanation for the Mercury "UFO"

Alright, a YouTube video popped up showing what purportedly is a UFO using cloaking technology tagging along the planet Mercury.

Take a look:


Now, before you stock up on Armageddon day supplies of a pending alien attack, fear not, I have an explanation of what I think this is.


NOTE: Since my original writing this blog, I have continued my quest to get to the bottom of this and refine my thoughts. You can read all of this, or simply skip to the bottom, for the real answer to what is going on.

The first thing that came to my mind was Mercury's magnetosphere. If you've seen simulations of earth's magnetosphere, you'll recognize the tale-tale signature of what a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) or solar flare looks like when it hits Earth's magnetosphere. If you watch the video there is a nice gap between the bright CME impact zone and the planet. It's pretty darn locked on.

EDIT: I also labeled the area that has already been explained by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)Here you'll notice the darkened band, which is the previous state of where Mercury was, and the light glint you see just above it. (You can still see the background stars are added back to the image.) You'll notice that the darkened band stretches back only so far, leaving behind the intense light. I would imagine if the correction time period was shortened, then the darkened band would be narrower, and more of the aurora would be visible.

Before I jumped to this conclusion, I did a little research, to first find out where the inner planets are currently located in their orbit, and a little about the satellite (named STEREO). So, I found this link, and made the graph below, adding STEREO to it based on it's likely position given by the fact that it's roughly within the same ellipse as Earth (though it doesn't orbit Earth) and the angle of Mercury and it's trajectory within the video. Now, you'll note that SECCHI is the label that I used for the satellite, which I got from the YouTube video. SECCHI is just the name of the instrument on the satellite. It was after making this graphic, that I learned about STEREO's name.

As it turns out, all you need to do is visit this page, and it confirmed my guess of it's position.

Now, I know what you're thinking, how can I be so sure? Well, I asked the same thing myself. Questions like, does Mercury even have a magnetosphere? The answer to that is.... yes. OK, then what does it look like? Check out this drawing provided by our good friends at NASA:

Essentially, this is just one heck of an Aurora. What we are seeing is the area that is aptly labelled the "bow shock". If this phenomenon doesn't have a name already, it ought to be called a Mercurial Equatorial Aurora, or Mercurial Aurora or something like that.

So, there you go, that's my quick explanation as to what we're seeing here. Of course I should give the disclaimer, I'm not a NASA scientist or anything like that, but, just your average Joe who likes to read about it once in awhile.

FINAL EDIT...
Well, after doing some more image analysis, I have conceded that the explanation given by the NRL is indeed correct. It is merely an artifact of the image subtraction (which doesn't go far enough to cover it's previous day's track.) Looking back, the problem with the YouYube Animation is that it only shows one day. In fact, if you check out the actual archives you can see that each day's images are grouped. So, I did something to prove the NRL explanation, and put together a two day animation here:

Taking a closer look at the images, and the previous day's track, the first smudge of Mercury starts to appear after 12 hours. So, if you can imagine there is a program that automates this process and falls short just a bit. What needs to happen is they need to add another 12 hours worth of frame subtraction. It's the kind of thing that I'm sure they run in circles trying to tweak. I've labeled the first 5 or 6 frames of each of the days in the two day animation. You can see that the image artifact matches the speed of the background stars, rather than the planet. If this doesn't satisfy you, you can always looks through any day of the archive, and watch the UFO, Aurora, image artifact appear at the end of each day.
So, there you have it. Was that a waste of time? Well, maybe. At least now it is explained without question or further doubts. On the sunny side, we all learned more about our solar system, and about image processing, which goes well beyond your average textbook explanation, huh?

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