The Roman Goddess of beauty and love, and the brightest object in the night sky after the moon.  Venus appears as a glowing, bright blue star; beautiful, calm, serene, distant, cool.

Venus over the Pacific Ocean Image; Mila Zinkova, all rights reserved

That’s the image, anyway.  When you get closer to Venus, you start to see some serious cracks in the “love and beauty” image.

For one thing, Venus is hot.  Very hot.  There is a runaway greenhouse effect at work on the planet, making its surface temperature about 460 degrees C (860 F).  This is hotter than the surface of Mercury.  Venus is isothermal, meaning its temperature is constant; pole to pole, night and day.  What a steam bath.

The atmosphere on Venus is very dense, too.  About 93 times denser than on Earth.  You’d have to go about 1 kilometer below the ocean to experience the same crushing pressure as the atmosphere on Venus.  Above the CO2 layer, there are thick clouds of sulfuric dioxide and sulfuric acid.  There is a huge atmospheric vortex on the south pole of the planet, and the cloud layers produce lightning, much like the clouds on Earth.  They also make it impossible to see the surface.

So much for serene, calm, and cool.

Surface of Venus from Soviet lander Venera 13. Image PD/USGOV

Venus has an interesting retrograde orbit; it rotates clockwise instead of counter-clockwise with a near circular orbit.  On Venus, the sun rises in the West and sets in the East.

In orbit, Venus overtakes the Earth every 584 days, changing it from the Evening Star to the Morning Star.  Whether she appears in the morning or the evening, Venus is hard to miss.  In fact, she is so bright in the sky, she has been reported as a UFO several times.

Hans Glaser woodcut, 1566 Public Domain

However Venus appears close up, from a distance she is our beautiful Morning and Evening Star.  I like to look up and find Venus in the night sky.  She is, indeed, hard to miss… and she is a true beauty in the night.

Moon and Venus in conjunction three consecutive nights; Image by fdecomite, some rights reserved