Steve’s Virtual Planet

Planning on Venus - pt1

Our sister planet Venus has returned in the western sky for Spring 2023 into July 2023. She will be with us for a number of weeks. This post will be the first one to discuss observing Venus this summer but the topic has been a favorite of mine for a while now. I first discussed the phases of Venus earlier and you might want to revisit the links on that previous post. Today, we’ll start by just finding Venus using our naked eye vision.

When planning your viewing of Venus, it’s helpful to use some kind of tool ahead of time to give you an idea where to look. You can start with a graphic view using one of my favorite tools - Sky View Cafe. For the task of spotting Venus, I first open the Sky tab, then select “Horizon - 45 Span” from the options. This reduces the size of the view of the sky, magnifying your field of view. Move the view to the west by dragging it with a mouse or by selecting a specific direction. Venus will be in the northwest for the coming weeks and arcing back up and south as the summer progresses.

Give the graphic view of the sky a try online first. You can roll the date and time back and forth and thereby determine when you will get the best line of sight from your vantage point. Also study how the twilight darkens the sky day by day. Once you get an idea where Venus will be in your field of view, then you can adjust the time and direction of this graphic view.

Good luck in your search. I’ll be back for a second post with some more suggestions. We’ll find an ephemeris so you can see the progression of Venus day by day. I’ll be working through that set of steps in part two. Using that data, we can begin to further explore the phases of Venus through a small telescope, just like Galileo did!

Updated May, 2023