Last night at around 9.30 the clouds cleared from the west just in time to witness a very close conjunction of Mercury and Venus. These are the two inner-most planets of the Solar System and are therefore always close to the Sun in the sky, so it was a great opportunity to catch them side by side just after sunset. Normally Mercury is quite hard to see: it's only around 3,050 miles in diameter and never strays far from the Sun, but being close to the brilliant Venus last night made it really easy to find.
Perhaps surprisingly, there are two or three meteorites that are considered to have their origins on Mercury, adding to the many known
achondrites from Mars and the Moon. Venus? Well it is possible: certainly Venus is covered with large impact craters, but it would be very unlikely for surface rocks to make their way upwards through the planet's dense atmosphere. However, there may well be material out there that was blasted into space before this formed.
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