Mercury continues its lengthy but poor evening apparition ~ now deep into the constellation Libra the scales, having passed Zubenelgenubi several days ago.  I was not able to see Mercury with unaided vision this evening despite having probably the best skies over the last month, however it was easy in binoculars, and it showed up nicely with my 200 mm lens.  I plotted the position of Zubenelgenubi (α Librae) and the ecliptic to illustrate how far south of that line Mercury is at this point.  If it were an equivalent distance north of the ecliptic instead of south, it would be easily visible.  Mercury is magnitude +0.12 this evening, which is almost exactly the same brightness as Rigel.   Unannotated image.