Venus tonight

Tonight in London

How to find it

After the Moon, Venus is the brightest thing in the night sky (up to magnitude −4.9), easy to see from a bright city and sometimes even in daylight. It never gets more than 47° from the Sun, so for some months it shines in the west in the evening and for others in the east before dawn. When it is bright and high, it casts a noticeable shadow in a dark place with no Moon.

The nearest bright signpost now is Spica: Venus is 15° from it, a few binocular fields away. Light takes 3 minutes to reach the Earth from the planet now.

When it shows over the next 12 months

Venus is in the evening sky at no time, and in the morning sky 6 Nov – 21 Feb. Brightest on 26 Nov (−4.9), closest to the Earth on 24 Oct, 41 million km.

Month by month

On the 15th of each month: when the planet rises and sets, its brightness, constellation and distance from the Earth.

Key dates

The inner planets show best when farthest from the Sun (greatest elongation) and not at all around conjunction with the Sun.

Phase and size over the coming months

Every two weeks, Venus as a telescope shows it, at one scale: as it nears the Earth the planet grows but turns into an ever thinner crescent.

The Moon next to the planet

Every month the Moon passes Venus, the easiest way to find the planet. The next close passes:

Where the planet is in the Solar System

The view from above: the Sun in the centre, orbits scaled down. Today Venus is 48 million km from the Earth; over the year the distance ranges from 41 million km to 259 million km.

What kind of planet

Venus is almost the same size as the Earth but nothing like it: thick carbon dioxide clouds with droplets of sulphuric acid trap the heat, so the surface is about 465 °C, hotter than Mercury, under 92 times the Earth's air pressure. Venus spins backwards compared with most planets and very slowly: one turn takes 243 days, longer than its year (225 days). Its surface of volcanic plains, mountains and lava flows is seen only by radar.

In binoculars

When Venus is close to the Earth and shows as a thin crescent (a few weeks either side of inferior conjunction), even good binoculars on a tripod can show the phase. Look in twilight rather than full darkness: Venus dazzles less and the crescent is sharper.

In a telescope

In a telescope Venus is a dazzling little disc whose phase and size change a lot over a few months: far from the Earth it is a small, nearly full disc (about 10″), close in a large thin crescent (up to 60″). No surface shows, only cloud; a violet or ultraviolet filter sometimes reveals cloud bands. It is best in twilight or in daylight, when the planet is high.

Exploration

Venus was the first planet a human-made craft landed on: the Soviet Venera 7 sent data from the surface in 1970, and Venera 13 returned colour pictures in 1982 and survived 127 minutes. NASA's Magellan mapped nearly the whole surface by radar in 1990–1994. Europe's Venus Express and Japan's Akatsuki followed, and NASA's DAVINCI and VERITAS and Europe's EnVision are being prepared for the coming decade.

Name and history

The planet carries the name of the Roman goddess of love. In Lithuanian mythology the morning and evening Venus are two bodies: Aušrinė, daughter of the Sun, who lights the fire for the Sun's journey, and Vakarinė, who makes her bed. In 1610 Galileo saw the phases of Venus and so proved that the planets go around the Sun, not the Earth. Venus sometimes crosses the face of the Sun; the last transits were in 2004 and 2012, the next is not until 2117.

Facts

Other planets