If you happen to be up a little before dawn sometime this month, go outside and take a look at the eastern sky. The planet Venus is putting on a show. It’s so bright, it looks like a flying saucer!
🙂
By September 20, it will reach magnitude -4.8, which is 23 times brighter than the brightest star. It’s an amazing thing to see in the quiet of the early morning. If you have a strong pair of binoculars or a telescope, you can see it as a brilliant crescent. Just now it’s moving ahead of the earth in its orbit around the sun. As it moves further from us, it will appear to grow dimmer, even as its crescent waxes.
Image: Maat Mons on Venus. Image reconstructed from radar images. NASA. Public domain.