Mercury stays close to the Sun, moves fast relative to its own idealized mean version, and takes $79$ years to make an approximately closed "analemma"; the next best being $46$ years but with $3\times$ more error. Refer to this table for the source of these numbers.
This basically means that the "analemma" curve is going to be so densely packed as to almost make it look like a sheet.
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| Mercury's "analemma" over $79$ years |
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| Mercury's "analemma" over $46$ years |
Even over $46$ years, the trace is quite dense.
Similar to my Mars "analemma", due to the number of tracking shots involved, I decided to forgo saving the screenshots (and thus gave up the option of making a movie). Instead, only Mercury's position was captured every $3$ solar days starting $2026$-Jul-$13$ $11$:$59$:$44$ UTC. Only one screenshot (of the starting position) was captured to serve as the base image to overlay the "analemma" trace on. The line width of the trace was reduced from $3$ (used earlier for other planets) to $1$.
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