KXO Radio AM1230 and FM 107.5

Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.  This month as the evening begins, the first star you see is an incredibly bright one. It's all alone, and  it blazes in the western sky, well above the mountains of San Diego County.  It's so unusually bright, that in the past some people have reported it as a UFO.  Frankie Avalon recorded a hit song about this particular evening star and it was played on this station back in 1959.

It's really not a star.  It's Venus our closest neighboring planet.  The planet Venus shines brighter than any star in the night sky.  The brightest star in the night sky is Sirius. As the sky darkens tonight you can also observe Sirius high in the southern sky. Compare the two, and you will see Venus is brighter than Sirius.

Using my telescope, I can see that Venus currently is not quite round but has a phase much like a phase of the moon.  Using the naked eye Venus is something to behold.Oddly enough with a telescope you don't see much, just a very bright object, that almost hurts your eye it's so bright.  

Since Venus is perpetually cloud covered, a telescope can't reveal its surface features like when observing the craters on the Moon or the features on Mars.  On Venus the bases of the clouds are very high at about 40 miles and in layers12 miles thick. Standing on Venus, if there was a break in the clouds, you would be able to see the bright blue Earth and its slightly smaller moon.  From Venus, both the Earth and the Moon, would appear almost full at all times.

The atmosphere of Venus is almost purely composed of carbon dioxide, with almost no oxygen or water vapor.  The combination of the green house gas, carbon dioxide, and the overcast cloudiness, trap the heat from the sun and Venus is much hotter than the earth.  

 Photo courtesy of:  Mark Johnston

The weather forecast for Venus would always be the same…

Overcast very high cloudiness. The high today 850 degrees.  

Outlook:  Little change.

Look for our very bright and warm neighbor, the planet Venus, high up in our western sky during the early evening hours this month.