In May, Venus is about 40 degrees off the horizon and due west at sunset. It will reach the highest point in the sky, from our perspective on May tenth. Then it will begin to slip back to the horizon.
Venus has been called Earth’s twin. She was the Greek goddess of beauty. She has had a romantic image since man begin to imagine images in the sky and give those objects names. To the Romans she was the goddess of love. To the Teutonic people Venus was known as Frig, the goddess wife of Wooden from which we get Friday ( Frig daeg ).
It was thought at one time Venus was covered with a tropical rain forest, like early Earth. With our Earth bound telescopes we were looking at thick rain clouds that surrounded Venus. Then in December 1962 Mariner 2 became the first succesful space probe to get information about Venus. The discoveries were a high surface temperature and pressure, a carbon dioxide atmosphere, anda cloud cover that topped out at 37 miles high. Other discoveries were no detectable magnetic field, that it rotates very slowly, and it rotates in the opposite direction of all other major planets, clockwise.
Being on the surface of Venus is the same as being 3000 feet below the ocean surface on Earth. Temperatures average 470 degrees Farenheit, but can reach 900 degrees Farenheit.
It is hard to to grasp that Venus takes longer to turn on its axis than it does to orbit the Sun, but it takes 224.7 days to make a Venusian year, but one revolution on its axis is 243 days. If you can take heat and pressure, it looks like Venus would be a great treadmill.
So, no longer Earth’s twin, Venus is just another planet that happens to be just a little smaller than Earth.
My father tells a story when he was working on a survey crew as a young man, he looked up one day at noon and saw Venus in daylight. He put the transit on Venus and was able to see it was in a phase sort of like the Moon. "Astronomy Magazine" (May 2007) has an article about that phenomena, and says yes, it is possible and Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln have seen it. Oddly enough if Venus can be seen in the spring sky during daylight, you will probably see her in the fall sky during daylight also. Dad, who is doing very well, will be 94 on May tenth.
If you connect Venus with an imaginary line to the Sun, even if the sun is below the horizon, you can determine the angle of the solar plane.
Because any single bright point of light will appear to jump all over the place to our eyes, Venus is the queen of UFO’s. Our eyes need two points of light to determine distance and movement. Anyone that’s been in a blacked out military convoy at night would appreciate the cat’s eyes lights of the vehicle ahead of them.
Gordon Prange writes in his book "At Dawn We Slept" that on the morning of Monday, December eighth,1941, that Venus rising at dawn was met with an intense barrage of anti-aircraft and machine gun fire by nervous personnel at Pearl Harbor. Marv
Other interesting things this month to look for:
May 2 Full Moon, Mercury at superior conjunction
May 4 The Moon passes 0.5 deg south of Antares
May 5 Eta Aquarid meteor shower peaks, bright Moon may spoil this.
The Moon passes south of Jupiter. 7 a.m. CDST
May 10 The Moon passes 1.8 deg south of Neptune 3 a.m. CDST
May 12 The Moon passes 1.3 deg north of Uranus 2 a.m. CDST.
The Moon will pass Mars 8p.m. CDST
May 16 New Moon 2:27 p.m. CDST
May 17 The Moon passes 3 deg north of Mercury 7 p.m. CDST
May 19 The Moon passes 1.7 deg north of Venus 8p.m. CDST
May 22 The Moon passes 0.8 deg north of Saturn 2p.m. CDST
May 30 The Moon passes south of Anyares, 9p.m. CDST
May 31 Full Moon occurs ay 8:04 p.m. CDST
