The Morning Star-Venus

Revised and updated 2 February 2026

At certain times anyone looking in the eastern sky just before sunrise will have notice a brilliant white object – the planet Venus,  sometimes called the Morning Star. It is much brighter than any other planet and is the third brightest natural object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon.

Image from NASA. Venus in the pre-dawn morning sky. The less bright object near to Venus is the planet Jupiter. Venus appears as a disc in the image because it is so bright that it has flooded the camera with light. To the naked eye Venus appears as a point of light.

The orbit of Venus

Venus is the planet which passes closest to Earth. At its closest approach it is only 40 million km, roughly 100 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon (Williams 2015). Because not only is it nearer to the Sun but it also moves faster in its orbit, a year on Venus lasts only 225 Earth days,

The orbit of Venus in shown above. As you can see, because Venus orbits the Sun inside the Earth’s orbit, to an observer on Earth it always stays close to the Sun. This means that for most of the time Venus is only above the horizon in the daytime when it is difficult to see.. The points marked as A in the diagram are known as the greatest elongations and are the points where, to an observer on Earth, Venus appears to be the greatest distance from the Sun in the sky. At these times, although Venus is still visible mainly in the daytime, it is also visible for a few hours at night before sunrise or after sunset. This effect is greater at higher latitudes, because the path of Venus through the sky has a shallower angle.

This is also true for Mercury.  The other planets orbit outside the Earth’s orbit and therefore can be seen in the middle of the night at certain times.

Venus during 2025 and 2026

Venus is both closer to Sun and moves faster in its orbit than the Earth. The Earth and Venus are like two runners in a race. It takes on average 584 days for Venus to gain a lap on the Earth and for them line up in the same position with repect to each other and the Sun.

Venus and seen from Earth in 2025 and 2026

On 23 March 2025 Venus passed between the Earth and the Sun. Astronomers call this the inferior conjunction. It appeared very close to the Sun in the sky and  for a couple of weeks either side of this date was difficult to observe – lost in the Sun’s glare.

As seen from Earth, Venus moved away from the Sun and appeared in morning in the east, before sunrise  as the morning star. For example, on 28 April 2025 , the date of writing this post, it rose at 4:32 am local time in Manchester England. This was 68 minutes before sunrise.

It then continued to appear further away from the  Sun in the sky. On 1 June 2025 it reached its greatest morning elongation when it was about 46 degrees from the Sun in the sky.  On that date in Manchester it rose at 3:24 am, which is  82 minutes before sunrise.

It then started to move closer to the Sun in the sky. On 6 January 2026 it was almost directly in a straight line with the Earth and the Sun. Astronomers call this the superior conjunction. It appeared very close to the Sun in the sky and  for a couple of weeks either side of this date its proximity to the Sun made it difficult to see.

After this, Venus will moved away from the Sun and now in February 2026 can be seen briefly evening in the west, after sunset, as the evening star. On 15 August 2026 it will reach its greatest evening elongation when it will appear about 46 degrees from the Sun in the sky.  On that date it will set at 9:33 pm,  in Manchester, 56 minutes after  sunset.

After then it will start to move closer to the Sun in the sky. On  23 October 2026 it will once again be at inferior conjunction and the whole cycle will repeat again

Transit of Venus

Because the orbit of Venus is tilted with respect to the orbit of the Earth, at inferior conjunction Venus normally passes just below or just above the Sun. Occasionally things line up so that Venus passes directly in front of the Sun when seen from the Earth. This is called a transit of Venus and the planet appears as a small dark dot against the bright disc of the Sun. This is a rare occurrence. It  happened back in the year 2012, and it won’t happen again until 2117 [2]

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The Phases of Venus

As seen from the Earth, Venus goes through a full set of phases in a similar way to the Moon, although, because Venus appears so small, these are only visible through a telescope.

Starting with with a “new Venus”,  at inferior conjunction shown as A above, when Venus is between the Earth to the Sun and the sunlit part of Venus faces away from us making the planet almost invisible, over a 584 day cycle the sunlit part of the Venus gets larger or waxes through to a crescent phase (B), to a half Venus (C) at the greatest elongation, to a full Venus at superior conjunction (D), when the whole Earth-facing side is illuminated.

 It then gets smaller or wanes back to a half Venus (E) at greatest elongation, then to a crescent (F) and then finally back to a new Venus at inferior conjunction

Galileo’s discovery of the Phases of Venus

The first person to notice the phases of Venus was the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642).

Image from Wikimedia Commons

In 1543, just before his death, Nicolas Copernicus had published the theory of heliocentrism – that the planets orbit the Sun. However, in Gallileo’s time, the teaching of the Catholic church favoured the geocentric theory of the Universe, the widely held view that the Earth was the centre of the Universe and the stars, planets, the Sun and the Moon were in orbit around it. Indeed certain verses of the bible could be interpreted as supporting that viewpoint, such as

Psalm 104:5  “the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.”

However, the phases of Venus and the way that it appears smaller when it is a full Venus can only be fully explained by Venus orbiting the Sun, not the Earth.  Therefore, Galileo concluded that the geocentric theory was incorrect.   Unfortunately for Galileo, in 1616 the Catholic church declared heliocentrism to be heresy. Heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to refrain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas.

However Galileo continued to defend heliocentrism, so in 1633 The Roman Inquisition tried Galileo in 1633 and found him “vehemently suspect of heresy”, sentencing him to indefinite imprisonment. Galileo was kept under house arrest until his death in 1642.

However the facts cannot be disputed. When viewed through a telescope Venus does show changes in size and shape, which can only be satisfactorily explained in a heliocentric model. Eventually, in 1758, the  the Catholic Church dropped the general prohibition of books advocating heliocentrism.

Venus viewed through the telescope

Through a telescope Venus appears to be a featureless object. This is in contrast to Mars where surface detail can be clearly seen.

Venus through a telescope -Image from NASA

Mars through a telescope_image from NASA

This reason why we can’t see any details on Venus is because the planet is completely covered in thick clouds which reflect most of the sunlight back into space and prevent us from seeing details underneath. So despite it being the closest astronomical object to the Earth other than the Moon, little was known about Venus until the 1960s. Without any surface markings to follow as the planet spins on its axis it was difficult to estimate how long a day on Venus is. This wasn’t discovered until 1961 when astronomers bounced radar signals of the planet and studied their echos.

It wasn’t until the Venus was visited by spacecraft in the 1960s that we knew how hot the surface and how thick the atmosphere were. Indeed, before then many scientists thought that conditions on Venus underneath the clouds were similar to Earth and there are many science fiction stories written before the 1960s where Venus is inhabited by alien life forms.  However, it turns out that the surface temperature is an incredibly hot 460 degrees Celsius on average, which is hot enough to melt lead, and the atmospheric pressure at the surface is a crushing 92 times the surface pressure of the Earth. The bright clouds turns out to be made out of highly toxic and corrosive sulfuric acid.

And finally…

I hope you have enjoyed this post. It is part of series of Explaining Science posts on Venus. Some of the other posts include:

• Why is Venus so bright compared to other planets
• Terraforming Venus so that humans could live and work there.
• Could humans live in the Venusian atmosphere? And why would they want to?
• The Transit of Venus

I have written a short Guide to Venus e-book about our sister planet.

In addition there’s a video on the Explaining Science YouTube Channel which describes Venus’s orbit and phases.

References

[1] Williams, D (2024) Venus Fact Sheet, Available at:http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/venusfact.html (Accessed: 10 November 2025).

[2] McClure, B (2012) Everything you need to know: Venus transit on June 5-6, Available at: http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/last-transit-of-venus-in-21st-century-will-happen-in-june-2012 (Accessed: 10 November 2025).