Month's planets

Evening star Venus makes its presence known alongside Saturn and Uranus, while early risers can enjoy the rest the Solar System has to offer

Evening star Venus makes its presence known alongside Saturn and Uranus

This month Venus will be a genuinely beautiful sight in the sky after dark. The world often – and very wrongly – called ‘Earth’s Twin’ will become visible very soon after sunset as an eye-catching, metallic glint high in the south-southwest. As twilight deepens and the sky darkens it will get brighter and brighter until it looks like a lantern blazing in the sky, a stunning ‘evening star’ far brighter than any of the stars around it and brighter than anything else in the whole sky apart from the Moon. Shining at magnitude -4.0 all through the month, Venus will be so bright that not even the ghastly orange glow of light pollution in a town or city will be able to hide it, and if you can get to somewhere truly dark you’ll be amazed by just how bright Venus looks. Nothing can compare to it.

It's ironic that such a beautiful, serene sight is in reality such a frightening world. Venus, the second planet out from the Sun, is like a world invented for a dystopian science-fiction film. Its atmosphere of thick, curdled carbon dioxide would be lethally poisonous to us, and the incredible pressure on its surface would crush us too. Droplets of acid fall through its sky, but evaporate in the terrible heat long before reaching the ground. It will not be a holiday destination any time soon.

By the end of January, when it will have wandered across Capricorn’s border into Aquarius, this beautiful but brutally hostile planet will be setting more than three hours after the Sun, and so it will be visible in a dark sky, not just in the twilight. Look at it through a pair of binoculars or a small telescope at this time and it will be a dazzling sight, juddering slightly as it drops slowly through the layers of air churning above the horizon.

Cross your fingers for clear evening skies during the last few days of January, because we’ll have an opportunity to see the crescent Moon gliding past Venus, the two objects forming a striking sight after sunset. On the 27th a fingernail clippingthin Moon will shine to Venus’ lower right. The following evening the Moon, now a slightly wider crescent, will lie to the left of Venus, just five degrees from it. On this evening the dark part of the Moon’s face should be lit by the pale, ghostly lavender-blue glow of ‘Earthshine’, and that should be the case on the following evening too, the 29th, when the Moon will have moved on along its track to shine to the upper left of Venus.