Sun rises at 6:09am.
Sun sets at 6:15pm.
Moon phase: Fourth Quarter, Waning Crescent.
Moon rises at 1:19am
Moon sets at 2:25pm
Venus
After the sun sets on Saturday, the evening star shines in the west. The brightest star in our sky… but there’s a problem with that statement. It’s not a star actually, but a planet: Venus. So bright is Venus that air traffic controllers have been known to give it permission to land, thinking it’s an incoming airplane!
Sometimes the evening star (as now) and sometimes the morning star, Venus’ orbit takes her around the sun inside of our own orbit. That explains why it may either lead or follow the sun from our perspective (see diagram). The morning star period and evening star period are each about nine-10 months.
Venus also exhibits phases, like our moon, periods of time when it is half-lit or crescent shaped or full. These phases were first observed by Galileo in 1610! In fact, this observable truth became a major point of proof in the debate about whether or not the earth was the centre of the universe (it’s not). Inconvenient things, those facts.
Venus has allured stargazers for millennia. In ancient times, she was imagined to be the goddess of love and beauty. The planet has the beauty of brightness in our sky, but through a telescope, there isn’t much to get excited about. Although she is our neighbour, her thick atmosphere shrouds the surface from any serious inspections. Not to talk trash, but she’s even worse up close.
Any way you consider it, Venus is a really awful place. No matter what unpleasant place you can imagine, you can be sure that Venus is still worse. First of all, it’s the hottest planet in the solar system, even hotter than Mercury! The surface temperature is 482 degrees C (900 degrees F!). Unlike Mercury, it doesn’t cool down much at night – thanks to the blanket of clouds.
There’s zero water on Venus, and the thick atmosphere causes the pressure to be 92 times the pressure here on earth. Even the clouds themselves are ghastly, made mostly of sulfuric acid.
For a long time, nobody knew what the surface of Venus looked like. The thick atmosphere was in the way. Then came radar, which sends radio waves right through the cloud cover. So now, thanks to radar, almost the whole surface has been mapped. Also we earthlings have sent several probes to Venus, although they don’t last long due to the heat, pressure and corrosive atmosphere. Check the pictures for images of the surface of planet Venus.
Venus’ heat and pressure are all caused by that thick carbon dioxide rich atmosphere. It’s the greenhouse effect gone wild. Carbon dioxide is the same gas that is causing global warming here on Earth. The greenhouse effect is when heat and light energy from the sun comes in and then gets trapped by the atmosphere and can’t leave. Our CO2 is coming mostly from industrial exhausts, all those motors burning fossil fuels. On Venus the CO2 likely came from volcanoes. Thus the universe has given us a cautionary example of what we don’t want our lovely planet to turn into, let us hope we take the lesson and learn.
Thank you for keeping up with the Night Sky articles. If you are out later on in the week, each star rises about four minutes earlier each day than written here, and the moon rises 50 minutes later. Night Sky is researched and compiled by Lisa Davis-Burnett. Space.com is a key resource for information and images.
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