Venus - News For Amateur Astronomers 

 Whether you have just recently received your first Modified Dall-Kirkham telescope or you have been studying the stars for some time, it will not be a surprise to you that Venus, the planet closest to our own Earth, is a fascinating subject of study for astronomers no matter what their skill levels. Venus is the brightest object in the night sky except for the Moon. Many have started their enjoyment of the movement of the stars by observing it.

Venus is also known as the morning star and the evening star, and due to its brightness, many people all over the world have attributed different meanings to it. The ancient Mayans, the great students of the stars of Mesoamerica, thought it more important than the sun and studied its movements carefully. Interestingly enough, Venus has a slower rotation than any other of the major planets. Despite having a shorter year than Earth does, one day on Venus is roughly equal to 243 days on Earth; essentially, that means that a day on Venus lasts just a little bit over a Venusian year.

Venus is the planet that lies just outside the orbit of Mercury, circling sun once every 224.7 days. This planet seems at its brightest right before sunrise or right after sunset, when it is usually the first star to be seen or the last one that is still lingering. This planet is very similar to earth in size and bulk, and it was even believed that years past that it had oceans, much like Earth does today. The atmosphere of the planet however, is mostly of carbon dioxide as there is no vegatation to absorb or replenish it. Between this and a dense cloud layer of sulfuric acid, the temperatures on Venus climbed until the oceans evaporated; the water vapor and hydrogen simply floated away into space.

The surface of Venus, once thought much like ours by people who had the golden clouds in the upper atmosphere was soon discovered to be anything but friendly with discoveries in 1962, when the Mariner 2 became the first of a dozen spaceships sent to observe our nearest planetary neighbor. From studying the clouds, it is calculated that the winds of Venus move about three times as fast as our worst hurricane gales, and that the surface temperature of Venus is around 900° F. Not only that, the atmospheric pressure of Venus is about 97 times that of Earth, making for an inhospitable landscape indeed!

When you are trying to find Venus in your Modified Dall-Kirkham telescope viewfinder, wait for a time when the Moon is fairly close to it in the sky. You can then use the Moon to locate Venus. Similarly, you can look for Venus during the daylight, near dawn or dusk. Sweep the horizon, but be very, very careful of the dangers of looking at the sun through visual aids. Venus is a great way to start off your study of astronomy, and you can join hundreds of thousands of people in enjoying this very special sight in the night sky.

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Astronomy Facts:

The Leonids are a meteor shower that occur each year from Nov. 14-20, with a maximum on Nov. 17-18. This meteor shower occurs each year as the Earth passes through the orbit of the comet Tempel-Tuttle, and icy remnants of the comet burn up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. The meteors in this shower seem to emanate from the constellation Leo (but they do not).