15 February 2017

Watch Brightest Venus on Friday


After Sunset in the western twilight sky we see a bright star outshining all the starts in the evening sky, this is the planet Venus. The visual apparent magnitude of the planet Venus is now -4.6 and the apparent magnitude of brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, in the constellation of Cains Major is -1.46 this makes Venus 18 times brighter than Sirius. 
Brocken Inaglory, Venus-pacific-levelled, CC BY-SA 3.0
On February 17th Venus will reach its brightest crescent phase and this is called Greatest Illuminated Extent, the amount of illuminated crescent and the angular diameter of the planet Venus. Venus will have an angular diameter of 39 arc seconds and fraction of illumination is .273 of the angular diameter. After this day the illuminated side will start decreasing and we will see the crescent getting thinner. By second week of March the illuminated fraction will be only .085 of the diameter of the planet and magnitude would have come down to -4.4 still brightest in the evening sky. 

View Through the Telescope on 17th of Feb



View Through the Telescope on 10th March



The planet Venus will slowly fade into glare of the Sun and will reach inferior conjunction on March 25th. In April we will see Venus in early morning sky before sunrise and again the Greatest Illuminated Extent will happen on April 30th. Time to take out the telescopes and observe Venus in coming days, if you don't have one you are always welcome at ABAA on Sundays evening and see the Venus through our telescope. Venus sets at 9pm now and in middle of March the planet will set at 7:30pm.




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