Venus enters the evening with a bang
Even in the worst areas of light pollution, you can’t miss Venus. After hiding out in the morning sky most of the last half of 2025, it has finally entered the Western evening sky and will continue to shine on after twilight in the west through most of October. Without a doubt, Venus is the brightest starlike object in the night sky. Only Earth’s moon is brighter than the second closest planet to the Sun.
This week, Venus pops out in the Butler twilight low in the west-northwest sky and sets not all that long after twilight ends. On this coming Monday evening, Venus will put on a tremendous show with a new, thin crescent moon, separated by less than three degrees. Just to the upper left of the moon and Venus look for the bright planet Jupiter. It’s not nearly as bright as Venus, but it’ll certainly get you attention. Don’t wait too long to catch this show because all three celestial bodies slip below the horizon by 10:30 p.m.
On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, the crescent moon will be a little fatter and will be parked right next to Jupiter. On Tuesday, it’ll be just to the lower right of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. On Wednesday, the moon will be just to Jupiter’s upper left.
For the next several weeks, you can’t help but notice that Jupiter and Venus are on a gradual collision course in the early evening sky. In a photo I took earlier this month of Venus and Jupiter in the northwestern sky, you can even see some of the background stars. On June 9 they’ll be in a really tight celestial hug, less than two degrees apart. They’ll look like cat’s eyes. Of course, they’re nowhere near each other physically but are certainly in our same line of sight from our vantage on Earth. I’ll have more on this upcoming tremendous conjunction in upcoming Starwatch columns.
Venus itself is so bright that if you’re really out in the boonies where it’s super dark, it can even cast a faint shadow. I’ve actually experienced that several times, the last time on an astrophotography trip to the Arizona desert a couple of years ago. The reason Venus is so brilliant is twofold. For one thing, it’s one of our next door neighbors in the solar system, and secondly, Venus is completely shrouded by very reflective clouds that bounce a great deal of sunlight our way.
Even as bright as Venus is, the planet named after the Roman goddess of love is anything but lovely. It has a poisonous atmosphere and is the hottest planet in our solar system. That cloud cover is mainly made up of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. Acid rain comes out of those clouds! There’s even occasional lightning. You certainly wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time floating in those clouds. It would be really rough on your complexion!
The heavy-duty carbon dioxide makes Venus the king of global warming in our solar system. Most of the sun’s light and radiation is bounced away by Venus’s highly reflective clouds, but some sunlight manages to fight its way through the thick clouds and heat up the planet’s rugged surface of mountains and valleys. But what happens is that most of the infrared radiation that rises in response to the sun’s heating is trapped and absorbed by the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That drives surface temperatures up like crazy. Temperatures on Venus can top 900 degrees at the surface. Another reason you don’t find many travel offers to Venus is that because of the very thick clouds, the atmospheric pressure at the surface is 90 times that of Earth’s surface. It’s a poisonous pressure cooker!
In spite of being so bright and close to the Earth, Venus is a really lousy telescope target. One obvious reason is all the cloud cover and another is that most of the time it’s really low in the sky. That gives it a fuzzy appearance because its light has to travel a longer path through our atmosphere. High winds can also greatly affect Venus’ visibility. If it's really windy and there’s a lot of wind shear in our atmosphere, Venus can even twinkle. Planets usually don’t do that because they're so much closer to Earth than the much more distant stars.
One cool thing about observing Venus is that it goes through phases just like our moon. That’s because its cycle around the sun lies within Earth's orbit. The angle between the Earth, sun, and Venus is always changing. Right now, Venus is in the shape of an oval-ish gibbous moon, but later on this summer, it’ll be crescent-shaped. Also, since Venus’ orbit around the sun lies within Earth’s orbit, Venus never veers all that much from the sun in our sky. We either see it as a “morning star” in the eastern sky before sunrise or as an “evening star” in the Western sky after sunset, where it is right now.
Enjoy your Venus summer!
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is also the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.
