Planet Venus

Planet Venus

Astronomically , as a central planet Venus circles the sun inside the earth 's orbit . It passes between the earth and the sun , when it is lost in the glare for about 14 days . This is known as the short meet (inferior conjunction , and at this time Venus is contiguous to the earth . Later on in the cycle the planet passes at the back the sun on the far side of its orbit--the long encounter-and is lost to view for almost three months . At this time it is farthest from the earth (superior

conjunction

In the autumn of 1610 Galileo moved from Padua back to Pisa , and sustained his astronomical observations . He examined the planet Venus and discovered that it moved through phases like the Moon , a discovery that struck another blow to the geocentric vision of reality . In the Aristotelian worldview , the Sun and the planets all rotated around Earth . But if this were true , then Venus must always lie between the Sun and Earth . From Earth , then , Venus would always appear as a hemispherical . In a heliocentric system , however , Earth and Venus can find themselves at times on opposite sides of the Sun . In that case Venus will move through phases , including a "full Venus " phase related to a full Moon . And that 's exactly what Galileo saw (Boas Marie , 1962

A scientist on the planet Venus , which is constantly swathed in dense clouds and from whose surface no image of Sun or other star is observable , would picture the firmament quite in a different way from an observer on the and surface of Mercury , on whose cloudless horizon the Sun never sets and still diverse would be the outlook of an researcher resident on the giant Jupiter , with its surface still plastic and its atmosphere saturated with ammonia gas and methane . Nor is it only the view upward to the skies that is colored and transfigured by these planetary differences , but also the viewpoint downward to the planets themselves , to their surface features : the solids and liquids , polar zones , equatorial belts , and the thin films of life that may (or may not ) overlay certain constructive surface areas of these spinning orbs

Venus has a temperature of about 450 degrees F at nearly three-quarters of an Astronomical Unit from the Sun . The interpretation give quite a different answer--about -40 degrees F . This is because Venus is covered with an wide-ranging atmosphere , full of clouds . These clouds reflect almost all the solar light and heat , and there is little left to heat the planet . But the some clouds will also bottle up any heat emission from the planet , so that the actual temperature of the surface of Venus may be much higher than the observed temperature . What we are actually observing is the temperature of the atmosphere of Venus above the cloud layer . In fact , this thick cloud layer averts us from knowing anything concerning the surface conditions on Venus--we do not even know how quickly Venus rotates...