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Abstract. The extent of the exosphere of Mercury above the planet's limb could for the first time be observed by detecting an excess absorption in the solar sodium line D 2 during the transit of Mercury across the solar disk on 2003 May 7. The observations were performed with a 2d Fabry-Perot spectrograph of the Vacuum Tower Telescope at Izaña, Tenerife. The absorption excess, blue-shifted by 13 pm relative to the solar line, is mainly concentrated near the polar regions. There, the absorption excess can be traced up to ≈700 km above the limb. Between the two polar regions, along the eastern limb, a weaker absorption excess can be seen. A possible streamer-like feature stretches more than 2000 km above the northern region. Assuming the density to decrease exponentially with height, we derive for the polar maxima vertical column densities of 3 × 10 10 cm −2 , volume densities at the surface of 2.5 × 10 3 cm −3 , and a density scale height of 150 km.

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Abstract.We study the evolution of the granulation dynamics from the observational point of view. Based on series of excellent spectrograms taken at the VTT, Observatorio del Teide (Tenerife), in 1999, we calculated temporal -spatial maps of the Doppler velocity, line width, and intensity in order to track the dynamical behavior of these observables at di fferent positions along the spectrograph slit. The Doppler velocity map reveals a granular dynamical time -the characteristic time associated with the decay of the Doppler velocity -of approximately 2 min, while the line width map does not show any characteristic time scale but rather a strong intermittence. The intensity map reveals the life time of the granulation as it is given in the literature. The granular dynamical time is practically equal to the value determined from spectrograms taken at the solar minimum 1994; so the dynamical time does not show any change over the solar cycle. The stochastic properties of the Doppler velocity and intensity data samples are studied (i) by means of their statistical moments and (ii) theoretically using presupposed model distributions. For the latter we estimated the distributions' parameters by means of the maximum likelihood method. The histograms of the Doppler velocity variations point to an asymmetric model distribution, while the histograms of the intensity variations infer a symmetric one. The intensity variations can be described well by a Gaussian probability density function, while the Doppler velocity variations are described by the double exponential (Gumbel) distribution, an asymmetric probability function. A remarkable result of the statistical analysis based on both series of observations in 1994 and 1999 is the unambiguous lack of flows with large velocity amplitudes within the intergranular space.

The transit of Venus in 2004 offered the rare possibility to remotely sense a well-known planetary atmosphere using ground-based absorption spectroscopy. Transmission spectra of Venus' atmosphere were obtained in the near infrared using the Vacuum Tower Telescope (VTT) in Tenerife. Since the instrument was designed to measure the very bright photosphere of the Sun, extracting Venus' atmosphere was challenging. We were able to identify CO 2 absorption lines in the upper Venus atmosphere. Moreover, the relative abundance of the three most abundant CO 2 isotopologues could be determined. The observations resolved Venus' limb, showing Doppler-shifted absorption lines that are probably caused by high-altitude winds. We demonstrate the utility of groundbased measurements in analyzing the atmospheric constituents of a terrestrial planet atmosphere using methods that might be applied in future to terrestrial extrasolar planets.