Anyone who’s even occasionally gazed into the early Butler evening sky this past winter and early spring has seen that bright “star” in the west.

At first, you might even mistake it for an incoming aircraft. In fact, it’s so bright that at times it can even cast a faint shadow in the dark countryside.

That bright star is no star at all but rather the planet Venus, named after the Roman goddess of love. Venus is a next-door neighbor to Earth and is also nearly the same size of our world, about 8,000 miles in diameter.

Venus is the second planet out from the sun orbiting our home star within Earth’s orbit. Currently, it’s only about 108 million miles away and that’s one of the reasons it’s so bright.

Venus’ brilliance is also due to its very bright and reflective cloud cover. Its atmospheric shell acts like a giant celestial mirror, reflecting all kinds of sunlight our way.

Planets produce no natural light of their own, so the only way we see them is because of sunlight bouncing off them. Venus is the best reflector in our solar system.

Despite its brilliance, Venus is a really dull sight through any telescope, no matter how big and fancy your scope is. All you really see is a white disk and that’s about it. There’s no way to see any of the Venusian surface.

One thing that Venus does that’s mildly entertaining is that it goes through phases just like our moon. Right now it resembles a gibbous moon, but sometimes it’s crescent shaped, depending on where it is in orbit around the sun and where Earth is in its orbit.

This week and next, Venus puts on a pretty good show as it celestially “hugs” the Pleiades, the brightest star cluster in the sky. Officially, this hug is called a conjunction.

The Pleiades are also known as the Seven Little Sisters because there are allegedly seven stars in the cluster you can see with the naked eye but most people can only see six of the little shiners. In fact, it looks just like a tiny Little Dipper, but the actual Little Dipper or Little Bear is much larger.

Venus is now forging eastward among the stars from night to night and is closing in on the Pleiades. Tonight, look for Venus just a little below the Pleiades, just more than five degrees away or about half the width of your fist held at arm’s length.

Venus draws closer and closer to the cluster as the week continues. It makes its closest pass to the Seven Little Sisters next weekend when Venus will only be a little more than two degrees to the left of the Pleiades.

Next week, Venus and the Seven Sisters will gradually pull away from each other.

Through a small telescope or even a pair of binoculars I think you’ll like what you’ll see.

While Venus is just a blah bright light the Pleiades are another story. Depending on how strong your optics are, you can see up to a hundred stars in a sphere over 80 trillion miles wide. The Pleiades are much farther away than Venus, more than 400 light years away.

Like most open star clusters, the stars of the Pleiades are young, probably around 100 million years old, which is extremely young when you’re talking about stars. In fact, most of the stars in the Pleiades were born just before the dinosaurs on Earth got wiped out by a comet.

Stars like the Pleiades are born in large groups out of large loose clouds of hydrogen gas called nebulae. These young stellar families stay together for millions and millions of years until gravity from neighboring stars starts tearing the cosmic siblings apart.

By the way, I have one more nugget about the Pleiades star cluster.

The Japanese refer to the Pleiades star cluster as Subaru. Sound familiar?

Back in the 1950s, seven small Japanese automakers merged to form a large company they call Subaru, after the seven stars that make up the Subaru star cluster. In fact, the early logo for the Subaru was an actual diagram of the cluster.

They’ve updated their logo over the years, but the present logo is still basically a cluster. Look at any Subaru and you’ll see what I mean.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul and is author of the book, “Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at www.adventurepublications.net.