Month's planets

Venus takes pride of place as an evening star, dazzling at an impressive magnitude for naked eye, binocular and telescope observers

Venus takes pride of place as an evening star, dazzling at an impressive magnitude

Venus is our Planet of the Month, not just because it’s bright and easy to find in the sky, but because there will be a lot going on around it in the sky too. Venus is often called ‘Earth’s Twin’, but that’s very misleading because the only thing they have in common is their size – they are roughly the same diameter. While Earth is a lush paradise, teeming with life, Venus is a hellish planet with a poisonous atmosphere, crushing surface pressure and lethal surface temperatures.

Because Venus orbits the Sun so closely it can never appear very far from it in the sky. Unlike the planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, which all orbit much farther from the Sun than Venus – and indeed than Earth – we can never see Venus high in a dark sky, only as a spark of light low in the sky in the morning or evening twilight, depending on the time of year. When it’s visible before sunrise Venus is known as the ‘morning star’, but this month Venus is an ‘evening star’, clearly visible to the naked eye as a bright point of light low in the southwest after sunset, looking like a metallic spark in the twilight.

Look more closely as the sky begins to darken and you’ll see Venus has company in the twilight – a fainter, more orange-hued star will be shining to its upper left. This is actually Mars, but the

Red Planet is definitely upstaged by Venus this month. As June moves into July the two planets will appear to drift closer and closer together in the sky, until they are almost touching on the evening of 13 July.

On that evening the two planets will be just the width of the full Moon apart, and will be a lovely sight through a pair of binoculars. They’ll make a great photographic target too, and you might even capture them with the camera on your phone if you hold it steady and zoom in on them.

There is growing demand for more robotic missions to Venus, so in the years to come we might see camera-covered balloons drifting through its atmosphere, or even armoured rovers trundling across its rocky, baked surface. In the meantime enjoy looking at Venus shining in the twilight as the evening star.