Experiment on Obtaining Mercury's Images by the Short Exposure Method

December 1–3, 1999, observations of the planet Mercury were carried out at the Abastumani Astrophysical Observatory of the Republic of Georgia by the short exposure method with the aid of a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. The materials of these observations are presented in this paper. It is shown that the reduction of the exposure down to 10 ms eliminates the image blurring caused by the atmospheric instability and considerably improves resolution. As regards the image distortions, they can be eliminated only by selecting acceptable images from a sufficiently large number of pictures obtained. The short exposure method allows one to obtain new results from the ground-based observations of Mercury.