Venus is now our night sky’s brightest planetary spark

The planet Venus, often celebrated as the “evening star” and the second most dazzling object in our night sky after the moon, will be at its brightest for the year tonight Tuesday 28 April 2020.

Star-watchers will be able to see it outshine Jupiter, its closest competitor in the luminosity stakes, nine-fold. And it will be 20-times brighter than Sirius, which is also known for being a heavenly bright spark.

Why Venus is such a bright spark

The reason for Venus’ intense luminosity is that its cloudy atmosphere of sulphuric acid works like a giant mirror and reflects up to 70% of the sunlight it receives back into space. As it moves closer to earth during its orbit, it appears increasingly bright and then starts to fade again as its journey takes it further away from our home planet.

If cloudy skies make you miss it tonight, don’t despair though. Venus will appear exceptionally bright for weeks to come yet and is best seen in the early part of the evening.

By the end of May, however, it will temporarily disappear from sight. This is because its orbit then takes it around the far side of the sun, where it cannot be seen from earth.

Its brightness made an airline pilot panic

Venus can seem so bright that, in 2011, it led to a remarkable aviation incident. The co-pilot of an Air Canada flight looked out from his cockpit, saw the dazzling light ahead and mistook it for the lights of an approaching aircraft.

He put his plane into an emergency dive in order to avoid what he thought was an imminent midair collision. Sixteen people on board suffered minor injuries as a result.

According to the website Live Science, Venus is also commonly mistaken for a UFO by seekers of little green men.

Mysterious Venus studied by ancient astronomers

Given its obvious and mysterious brightness, Venus has long been studied by ancient astronomers.

“The ancient Babylonians tracked its wanderings through the sky in records that date as far back as 1600 BC. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras was the first to discover that the brightest stars in the morning and evening sky were in fact the same object, Venus,” says Space.com.

“Throughout history, Venus has been one of the most studied and speculated-about celestial bodies in our sky,” it quotes Sue Smrekar, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California as saying.

Could it have been the famous Star of Bethlehem from Biblical times? Most experts seem to think not.

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