e-book from Explaining Science on Venus

Updated 7 December 2025

I have now updated my e-book on Venus, the planet closest to the Earth in distance, size and internal composition, and the third brightest natural object in our sky after the Sun and the Moon.

Topics include

• how Venus appears from Earth and the fact that Venus’s phases can only be explained by a heliocentric theory and not the geocentric theory
• exploration of the Venus by spacecraft – these missions discovered a harsh hostile world, where the surface temperature is nearly five hundred degrees Celsius and the atmospheric pressure is a crushing 92 times that of Earth
• the transit of Venus, an astronomical event in which Venus appears to cross the surface of the Sun – observations of the transit of Venus were critical to the development of astronomy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• settling on and terraforming the planet.

 

To find out more click on A Short Guide to Venus e-book

 

 There are a series of Explaining Science posts on Venus. These include:

• Why is Venus so bright compared to other planets
• How Venus appears from the Earth, its phases and the 584 day cycle
• 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