Solar system · Venus

Where is Venus right now?

Venus, wrapped in its unbroken yellow-white clouds, drawn in Exo-View

Venus is the planet that comes nearest to the Earth, and the brightest thing in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. It goes round the Sun in 225 days, so it swings from the evening sky to the morning sky and back about every 19 months. Exo-View puts it where it is at this moment and lets you fly in to it.

Fly to Venus See every planet

Orbit: 224.7 days
Distance from the Sun: 0.72 AU, about 108 million km
Distance from Earth: From about 38 million km to about 260 million km
Width: 12,104 km, a little less than the Earth's
Day: It turns once in 243 Earth days, backwards: one spin is longer than its year
Surface: About 465 °C, hotter than Mercury, under air about 90 times as thick as ours

The evening star and the morning star

Venus is closer to the Sun than we are, so from the Earth it never strays far from it: at most 47° away. It shines in the west after sunset, as the evening star, or in the east before sunrise, as the morning star, and it changes from one to the other about every ten months. At its best it is far brighter than any star, bright enough to throw a faint shadow. Through a small telescope it shows phases, like the Moon, which Galileo saw in 1610 and which showed that the planets go round the Sun.

A runaway greenhouse

Venus is almost the Earth's twin in size, but its thick air of carbon dioxide traps the heat so well that its surface is hot enough to melt lead, with clouds of sulfuric acid above. It turns backwards and very slowly, so the Sun rises in the west, and from one sunrise to the next takes about 117 Earth days. Its clouds are unbroken and bright, which is why photographs show no surface at all. Radar has mapped the ground beneath. The only craft that sent pictures from it, the Soviet Venera landers, lasted at most about two hours.

Crossing the Sun

Venus sometimes passes exactly across the Sun's face, a transit. They come in pairs eight years apart, then none for more than a century. The last were in 2004 and 2012, and the next will be in December 2117.

In Exo-View

The button below flies from the Sun to Venus, drawn as its clouds look from outside. Open its plate for its figures, and run the clock forward to watch it pass the Earth.