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Venus For the Amateur Astronomer

Whether you have just recently purchased your first Classical Cassegrain telescope or you have been studying astronomy for some time, it will not even be a surprise to you that Venus, the planet closest to our own Earth, is a fascinating subject of study for astronomers no matter what their skill levels. Venus is the brightest object in the night sky except for the Moon. Many have started their study of the planets by looking through binoculars at it.

Venus is also known as the morning star and the evening star, and due to its brightness, many peoples throughout history have attributed different meanings to it. The  Mayans, the great students of the heavens of Mesoamerica, thought it more important than the sun and studied its movements carefully. Interestingly enough, Venus has the slowest rotation of any of the major planets. Despite having a shorter year than Earth does, one day on Venus is just about the same as 243 days on Earth; essentially, that means that a day on Venus lasts just a little bit over a year.

Venus is the planet that lies the second closest to the sun in our solar system, orbiting sun once every 224.7 days. This planet shines its brightest right before sunrise or right after sunset, when it is reliably the first star to be seen or the last one that is still lingering. This planet is very similar to earth in gravity and bulk, and it was even believed that years past that it had oceans, much like Earth does today. The atmosphere of the planet however, consists mostly of carbon dioxide due to the fact that there is no plant life to absorb or replenish it. Between this and a dense cloud layer of sulfuric acid, the temperatures on Venus became high enough that the oceans evaporated; the water vapor and hydrogen dissolved into space.

The surface of Venus, once thought suitable to life by people who had only seen the golden cloud layer was soon discovered to be unlivable with discoveries in 1962, when the Mariner 2 became the first of a dozen spacecraft sent to observe our nearest neighbor. From observing the clouds, it is calculated that the winds of Venus move about three times as fast as our worst hurricane gales, and that the surface temperature of Venus is around 900° F. In addition to that, the atmospheric pressure of Venus is about 97 times that of Earth, making for hardly a livable landscape indeed!

When you are searching for Venus in your Classical Cassegrain telescope viewfinder, wait for a time when the Moon is fairly close to it in the sky. You can then use the Moon to locate Venus. Similarly, you can look for Venus during the daylight, near dawn or dusk. Sweep the horizon, but be very, very careful of the dangers of looking at the sun through visual aids. Venus is a great way to start off your study of the planets, and you can join hundreds of thousands of people in enjoying this very special sight in the night sky.

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Astronomy Facts:

Density is a measure of how massive an object is per unit volume. For example, iron is more dense than wood; one cubic meter of iron weighs more than one cubic meter of wood.