Venus is the second planet from the Sun and the sixth largest. Venus' orbit is the most nearly circular of that of any planet, with an eccentricity of less than 1%.
orbit: 108,200,000 km (0.72 AU) from Sun
diameter: 12,103.6 km
mass: 4.869e24 kg
Venus (Greek: Aphrodite; Babylonian: Ishtar) is the goddess of love and beauty. The planet is so named probably because it is the brightest of the planets known to the ancients. (With a few exceptions, the surface features on Venus are named for female figures.)
Venus has been known since prehistoric times. It is the brightest object in the sky except for the Sun and the Moon. Like Mercury, it was popularly thought to be two separate bodies: Eosphorus as the morning star and Hesperus as the evening star, but the Greek astronomers knew better. (Venus's apparition as the morning star is also sometimes called Lucifer.)
Since Venus is an inferior planet, it shows phases when viewed with a telescope from the perspective of Earth. Galileo's observation of this phenomenon was important evidence in favor of Copernicus's heliocentric theory of the solar system.
A special thanks to all of you lovely humans for sending me kind words and comments.
Venus, the dazzling morning or evening star, outshines all the other stars and planets in the night sky. It begins the year in the evening sky, low in the west shortly after sunset. It then passes between Earth and the Sun, and will disappear in the Sun's glare for a few days. It will return to view late in the month as the brilliant morning star quite low in the southeast. Venus will spend most of the year in the morning sky, climbing higher during the spring and summer before dropping back toward the Sun. It will pass behind the Sun in late October, so it will be lost in the Sun's glare from early September through early December. It will reemerge in the evening sky by year's end.
