STARGAZER - THIS MONTH'S PLANETS

As we move into late spring, Venus remains a dazzling target

Venus is the brightest planet on view this month. There are some interesting things going on around it, but the other planets are all much more poorly placed and harder to see. Venus is known by many people as the ‘evening star’, but it can also shine before dawn. It’s often called ‘Earth’s twin’, but that’s a very inaccurate label: it is a hellish planet with crushing atmospheric pressures, lethal surface temperatures and a sky so thick with curdled carbon dioxide clouds that its rocky, fractured surface is never bathed in sunlight. It’s ironic that it’s named after the goddess of love because it shines so beautifully in our sky.

At the start of our observing period Venus will be a beautiful ‘evening star’, visible as a silvery spark in the twilight soon after sunset and strikingly bright by the time darkness has fallen properly. Embedded in the glittering stars of Taurus, forming the peak of a triangle with the famous Hyades and Pleiades star clusters, Venus will shine brighter than anything else in the sky apart from the Sun and Moon, and by 22:00 on the cool nights of late April it will be quite a lovely sight to the naked eye and through binoculars and telescopes. Mars, shining to its upper left, will be an underwhelming, pale-orange star in comparison.