An astrophotographer captured a breathtaking scene as the International Space Station zoomed by Venus in the daytime sky.

What is it?

Photographer AJ Smadi set up the scene on July 18 in a park near Seattle, Washington. Smadi used a 9.25" (23.5 cm) Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope and a ZWO ASI662MC camera equipped with an ultraviolet and infrared filter to capture the incredible image.

But this isn't the first time Smadi has pulled off such a feat. Just over a year ago, the photographer captured the ISS beside Venus in a photo that was selected by NASA as one of its Astronomy Photos of the Day.

"The thing that inspired me to capture Venus with the ISS is the fact that nobody has done it before," Smadi told Space.com by email. "After having realized this in April 2025 following my first time capturing the pair together, I was determined to best my own achievement," Smadi said.

Smadi regularly photographs the ISS but says the clarity differs greatly depending on the stability of the air and its distance.

Why is it incredible?

Capturing Venus, the ISS, or any other object in space (other than the moon) during the daylight hours takes careful planning and a deep understanding of astrophotography techniques and filters.

The ISS travels at a mind-boggling 4.6 miles per second (7.5 km per second) and is 84 million miles (135 million kilometers) away from Venus, so lining up a photograph of the two seemingly side-by-side is no easy feat and takes painstaking planning.

For more of AJ Smadi's work, including photos of the ISS transiting the sun, the moon, and passing by Saturn, visit his Instagram.

Between July 7 and July 17, Venus will put on two evening-sky shows: first passing close to Regulus, the brightest star in Leo the Lion, and then appearing near a waxing crescent moon.

Both events are easy to see with the naked eye and offer excellent opportunities for casual skywatchers and photographers alike.

Look low in the western sky after sunset for both events. Viewing times and positions are best suited for observers at mid-northern latitudes; check a local skywatching app for exact timing in your area.

When to look: Around 9:45 p.m. local daylight time in mid-twilight.

Where to look: Low in the western sky for Venus and Regulus; west-northwest for Venus and the crescent moon.

Best tools: Both events are visible to the unaided eye, but binoculars will improve the view.

Venus meets Regulus

The first celestial meeting will be when Venus aligns with the blue-white star Regulus, the brightest star of Leo, the Lion. Six stars in Leo form a large backward question-mark shape, popularly known as the Sickle. Regulus is at the end of the handle. It was one of the four "royal stars" which were supposed long ago to rule over the four quarters of the heavens. On the list of the 21 brightest stars, Regulus is number 21, but at least it's on the list.

Key dates

Silvery white Venus and blue-white Regulus will be 3 degrees or less apart from July 7 through 12th and will be closest — just one degree apart — on July 9.

July 7: We see them side by side, Venus on the right, Regulus on the left.

July 9: They're somewhat closer, with Venus to the upper right of Regulus.

July 11: The gap between them will be noticeably wider with Venus sitting to the upper left of Regulus. Look low toward the west around 9:45 p.m. In late twilight, both planet and star will be readily visible to the unaided eye. The difference between the two is considerable: Venus will outshine Regulus some 158 times; binoculars will enhance the view.

Venus pairs with the moon

Then, on July 17 comes the second meeting, this time with the moon. The moon will be 3.5 days past new phase, a slender crescent 17% illuminated, sitting to the left of Venus. They will not be particularly close together, being separated by about 6 degrees by mid-twilight. Regardless, both will attract attention, calling even casual observers to look at them as they descend toward the west-northwest sky, finally setting at around 10:30 p.m. As was the case with Regulus, binoculars will enhance the view of Venus with the moon. You'll no doubt notice earthshine — sunlight reflected from off the Earth toward the moon, which will faintly illuminate its dark part with a greyish-blue glow, seemingly imparting a three-dimensional effect.

What's next for Venus?

Near the start of this year, Venus was situated behind the sun at superior conjunction (on Jan. 6) and entered the evening sky, yet it was hidden from our view for many weeks due to its proximity to the sun. But Venus rapidly climbed out of the bright evening twilight during March, becoming by far the most brilliant of all the "stars," and by mid-June it stood nearly 30 degrees above the sunset horizon and was setting 2.5 hours after the sun.

Since then, Venus has taken a track placing it increasingly to the south of the sun's path across the sky. The result of this is that although its angular distance from the sun continues to increase, this is balanced out by its southerly track, which in the coming days and weeks will cause it to become progressively lower and set gradually earlier relative to the sun.

As such, compared to now, Venus will be noticeably lower in the western evening sky at its greatest elongation (46 degrees) on Aug. 15. Come the end of September, it rapidly sinks, appearing as an increasingly large, thinning crescent through telescopes and steadily held binoculars. At mid-northern latitudes, we'll have to struggle to catch it very low in the west-northwest soon after sunset during the final nights of September. It falls past the sun on October 24th — well south of it (6 degrees) at this inferior conjunction, so any chance of trying to get a glimpse of it on those evenings and mornings of adjacent days will be solely for those who reside south of the equator, in the Southern Hemisphere.

But during November, it will dramatically sprout up into the morning sky, ultimately grabbing the attention of early risers and providing us with a perfect "Star in the East" adorning the predawn sky during the Christmas season.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

The moon passes directly in front of Venus during a rare daylight occultation on June 17, 2026, creating one of the month's most unusual and technically challenging skywatching events.

For most of North America, the moon will slide over Venus in the mid-afternoon. The chances of witnessing this rare event are good, provided the skies are clear and deep blue.

There is one important catch: the event takes place in broad daylight. Between roughly 3:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. EDT, the sun will still be high in the sky, while the moon and Venus will sit about 38 degrees away from it. Anyone using binoculars or a telescope must be incredibly careful not to accidentally sweep across the sun, which can cause instant and permanent eye damage.

Never sweep the daytime sky with binoculars or a telescope without knowing exactly where the sun is. To view the occultation safely, place your telescope in the physical shadow of a building so the sun is completely blocked by the roofline.

Read more: How to observe the sun safely (and what to look for)

The moon will be a very thin waxing crescent, about 2 to 3 days old and roughly 11% to 14% illuminated. Venus, meanwhile, will be blazing at magnitude -4.0.

While Venus is technically bright enough to be seen with the naked eye during the day if you have 20/20 vision and know exactly where to look, daylight washes out much of the contrast. Binoculars or a telescope are exactly what you want here. The crescent moon acts as a perfect celestial guidepost to help locate the planet, and the optics will provide a spectacular view of Venus slipping behind the unilluminated edge of the lunar disk.

Through a telescope, watching the jagged, unlit edge of the lunar crescent slowly consume the brilliant white disk of Venus against a blue daytime sky is an unforgettable sight.

If you would rather not explore the sky during the daytime, the evening sky has another treat in store. The waxing crescent moon will be sitting near the Beehive Cluster (M44) in the constellation Cancer.

Once the sky is fully dark — about 45 to 60 minutes after sunset — look toward the moon. Just a few degrees away, you'll find a faint, fuzzy patch of light. That's the Beehive Cluster. Through binoculars, it completely transforms into a sparkling scattering of dozens of faint blue-white stars. Spanning about the width of three full moons, the cluster and crescent moon will fit comfortably into the same binocular field of view, creating a spectacular sight.

The bright sunlit sliver of the moon will be dazzling, but the rest of the lunar globe will be visibly glowing from sunlight reflected off Earth's oceans and clouds back onto the moon. Known as earthshine, the effect makes the moon appear strikingly three-dimensional through binoculars.

The moon and Beehive Cluster also provide an excellent target for a quick, wide-field astrophotography project. Mount a DSLR camera with a 135 mm lens on a tripod and expose long enough to capture the glittering swarm of Beehive stars while keeping the exposure short enough to preserve the earthshine on the dark side of the lunar crescent.

Look west sky after sunset on June 17 to witness a slender crescent moon gleaming alongside the stars of the Beehive Cluster at the head of a dazzling planetary parade.

Mercury's steady light will shine low on the western horizon in the glow of the setting sun, as while Jupiter glistens close to its upper left, with Venus and the moon lining up beyond to create a spectacular planetary display.

You may notice the soft glow of earthshine infusing the night side of the moon on June 17, as light bounces off our planet to illuminate the lunar crescent while it glides silently through the 1,000-strong stellar population of the Beehive cluster.

A pair of 10x50 binoculars will reveal dozens of the brilliant, young stars surrounding the three-day-old moon, while a 4-inch telescope will provide the magnification needed to highlight the cloud bands of Jupiter and its four large Galilean moons.

Mercury will be the first of the parade members to slip from view, less than two hours after sunset, while the moon will remain visible for another hour after that for stargazers in the U.S., before it dips below the western horizon.

The following night sees the waxing moon leave Venus and the Beehive Cluster behind, as it sweeps towards the blue-white light of Regulus — a multi-star system that glistens at the heart of the constellation Leo.

Mercury, meanwhile, will sink closer to the horizon with each passing night in the weeks that follow, as Venus rises away from Jupiter to chart a course through the constellation Cancer, before passing just 1 degree from Regulus on July 9.

Interested in snapping your own photos of the night sky? Then be sure to read our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography, along with our beginner's guide to imaging the post sunset realm.

Editor's Note: Want to share your planetary photos with Space.com's readers? Then please send your image(s) and comments, along with your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Mercury reaches greatest elongation on June 15, placing the elusive planet at its farthest apparent distance from the sun in the evening sky. That makes this one of the best opportunities of the year to spot Mercury after sunset, shining below Venus and Jupiter in the western sky.

As an "inner" planet, Mercury never strays particularly far from the horizon compared to the outer planets like Mars and Jupiter, which shine brightly overhead from dusk to dawn at opposition, when they sit opposite the sun in Earth's sky.

Mercury's tight orbit around the sun sees it yo-yo back and forth between the evening and morning sky throughout the year. As such is it often lost from view in the glare of our parent star. The rocky world will reach its point of greatest elongation on June 15, when it will appear about 17 degrees away from our parent star — marking one of the best times to see it in its current evening apparition.

How to find Mercury on June 15

Look to the western sky at sunset to find Mercury shining less than 20 degrees above the horizon, with Jupiter and Venus forming a line to its upper left. The razor-thin crescent of the waxing moon will also be present to the lower right of Mercury, all but impossible to spot in the glow of the setting sun.

The weeks that follow will see Mercury's steady light move inexorably closer to the horizon with each passing night, leading up to its inferior solar conjunction on July 12, when it passes between the sun and Earth before transitioning to a morning object.

Want to catch striking images of the night sky? Then be sure to read our picks of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography, along with our beginner's guide to imaging the night sky.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Astrophotographer Soumyadeep Mukherjee has shared a spectacular 30-day collage of the western night sky titled "Closer, Everyday", which captures the subtle motion of Jupiter and Venus as they danced through the skies above Kolkata, India, ahead of a dramatic planetary conjunction.

The photos used to create the collage were taken with a Nikon Z6II camera paired with a Sigma 50 mm lens in the hours following sunset from May 11 through to June 9, as Jupiter and Venus shone close to one another in the constellation Gemini.

"On most of the days, the images were captured during civil twilight in order to showcase the varying colours of the twilight sky along with the planets," Mukherjee told Space.com in an email. "However, on some occasions, due to the presence of clouds, images were captured during nautical and astronomical twilight."

Mukherjee remained consistent with his technique throughout, varying only the shutter speed to account for changing light conditions, creating a gorgeous glimpse of the planetary procession. "During capturing the images, the camera was kept level to the horizon, and the planets were placed right at the middle of the frame, as much as possible," explained Mukherjee. "The images were captured with the same camera, the same lens, at the same focal length."

Each successive shot tracked the relentless movement of Jupiter and Venus as they circled the sun, while appearing to draw closer to one another in Earth's sky. The slow dance came to a climax on June 9 — which is depicted in the far right panel — when skywatchers worldwide were treated to a dramatic planetary conjunction as Jupiter and Venus shone less than 2 degrees away from one another above the western horizon.

In reality, the close pass of Jupiter and Venus was nothing more than a misleading matter of perspective. Venus has actually been growing more distant from Jupiter throughout the 30-day photoshoot, during which time it added another 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) between itself and the gas giant as it raced toward Earth.

Want to create your own incredible photos of the night sky? Then be sure to read our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography, along with our beginner's guide to photographing the post-sunset realm.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter align low over the western horizon after sunset tonight, creating a satisfying mini planetary parade and a perfect astrophoto opportunity using a wide-angle lens or even just a smartphone.

Even though Venus and Jupiter have drifted apart slightly since their tight embrace on June 9, Mercury has climbed up beautifully from the sun's glare to join the party. Together, they form a striking slanted line along the ecliptic in the west-northwestern sky right after sunset.

This is a high-speed game. The optimal viewing window starts exactly 30 minutes after your local sunset and lasts for only about 30 to 45 minutes before Jupiter and Mercury follow the sun below the horizon.

Look for blazing Venus first — it will pop out while the sky is still bright. Drop your eyes down and slightly to the right to easily spot Mercury and Jupiter.

For observers using telescopes or imaging equipment, June 12 also offers an interesting opportunity to compare the appearance of the three worlds. Venus will show a small, intensely bright, 80%-illuminated gibbous disk, while Mercury will present a stark contrast with its 50%-illuminated "half-moon" phase. Resolving a clean, tiny half-Mercury in twilight is an elite visual feather in any amateur's cap. Jupiter will appear as a much larger disk, although its low position above the horizon means atmospheric turbulence may blur some detail. Under steady conditions, advanced imagers may be able to capture hints of the planet's famous equatorial cloud belts alongside Mercury's sharply defined silhouette.

For photographers, however, June 12 is all about landscape composition. Put away the prime-focus telescope adaptors and grab a 50 mm to 85 mm prime lens on a DSLR/mirrorless camera. Expose for the deep twilight sky colors and frame the three planets as a slanted cosmic ladder ascending over a crisp local silhouette — like a mountain ridge, a distant city skyline, or a line of pine trees.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky in more detail, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

Jupiter and Venus put on a spectacular performance as they met in the twilight sky on June 9 during a close planetary conjunction as Mercury lurked nearby — and we've got the photos to prove it!

The planetary trio have been locked in a mesmerizing slow dance in the western sunset sky over the past few weeks, forming a spectacular line-up before breaking ranks in dramatic fashion, as Venus beat a slow but inexorable path towards Jupiter.

The cosmic dance came to a climax on June 9, as Jupiter and Venus reached conjunction while shining less than 2 degrees from one another amongst the stars of the constellation Gemini.

Read on to see spectacular images of the close planetary approach, as captured by the global astrophotography community.

June 2026 Venus-Jupiter conjunction in photos

Astrophotographer Josh Dury snapped a gorgeous view of Venus and Jupiter meeting in the skies above the prehistoric Avebury stone circles in Wiltshire, U.K., on June 8, as the bright stars Castor and Pollux glowed off to their right.

"These two stones almost appear to mirror the angle of the planets," Dury noted in an email to Space.com. "Almost like a couple gazing up to the wonders of the universe."

Our next view was captured by Cheng Xin as the planetary duo shone brightly in the skies over the city of Shenzhen in the Guangdong Province of China — close enough to fit comfortably in the field of view of a pair of 10x50 binoculars.

Photographer Riste Spiroski took this image of the planets shining above the rooftops of Skopje, the capital city of the Republic of North Macedonia. Tiny dots extending from Jupiter's disk hint at the presence of its four Galilean moons.

"While Venus and Jupiter are separated by hundreds of millions of kilometres in space, tonight they appeared close together from our perspective on Earth, creating one of the year's most beautiful celestial sights," Spirosky told Space.com in an email. "I was particularly drawn to the contrast between the couple focused on their phone and the rare astronomical event above them, this contrast inspired the story behind this series."

Yasser Al-Zayyat took this photo of Jupiter and Venus sitting above the Kuwait City skyline on June 9, as skyscrapers cast artificial light into the twilight realm at the climax of the planetary conjunction.

Our final image comes courtesy of Osama Fathi, who captured the distant worlds shining over the volcanic mountains of Egypt's Black Desert on June 6, as Venus drew closer to Jupiter in the twilight sky using a Nikon Z6 camera paired with aNikon Nikkor 24 mm lens.

"The terrestrial foreground was captured during the twilight 'blue hour,' while the star-studded sky was built by stacking multiple short exposures to reveal the faint background stars without blowing out the bright planets," Fathi told Space.com in an email.

Want to capture gorgeous images of the post-sunset realm for yourself? Then be sure to read our beginner's guide to photographing the night sky, along with our roundups of the best lenses and cameras for astrophotography available in 2026.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Jupiter and Venus will be separated by less than two degrees in the sunset sky on June 9! Here's how you can watch the dazzling conjunction from the comfort of your home, courtesy of a livestream from the Virtual Telescope Project.

The livestream is scheduled to start at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT), featuring live views of Venus and Jupiter from the Virtual Telescope Project's suite of robotic telescopes in Manciano, Italy, weather permitting.

Virtual Telescope Project founder Gianluca Masi shared a gorgeous photo of Jupiter and Venus shining together on June 6, which gave us a tantalising preview of the breathtaking visuals that we can expect during the upcoming livestream.

Venus shines to the right in the image, surrounded by a diffuse haze as the sunlight reflected off its surface illuminates a wisp of cloud during its passage through Earth's atmosphere. Jupiter — the king of the planets — casts a warm light to the left, accompanied by a line of bright star-like objects that represent the gas giant's four large Galilean moons.

By June 9, Venus will sit less than two degrees to the upper right of Jupiter in the western sky — roughly the width of two little fingers held at arm's length — while Mercury's steady light will shine to the lower right of the planetary duo, almost lost in the glow of the setting sun.

Want to capture spectacular photos of the night sky for yourself? Then be sure to check out our beginner's guide to photographing the night sky, along with our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you capture a photo of Jupiter and Venus and would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Shortly after sunset on June 9, Venus and Jupiter will look very close together, in what is known as a planetary conjunction.

Sunlight will reflect off the cloudy tops of Venus and Jupiter before journeying millions of miles to enter Earth's sky in almost the same place, making the planets appear very close to one another on Tuesday (June 9). But in reality, the two planets will be separated by at least four Earth-sun distances in space.

A conjunction between Jupiter and Venus also happened just ten months ago, in August 2025. Before that, in May 2024, preceded by March 2023. Its occurrence roughly once every year is a sign of a wonderful arrangement of planets that may be absent around other stars. And as it turns out, the conditions that set Venus and Jupiter up for their conjunction are the same that are critical for life to survive on Earth.

'Pie' in the sky

Thanks to the explosion of exoplanet discoveries over the past decade, planetary scientists like Kat Volk, who works at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, know there are many distant worlds taking wonky and puffed-up loops around their parent stars. But the solar system is more like a pie of pizza.

The flat-disk shape means that, although the sky is a huge dome above our heads, the planets can only appear in part of it.

Venus, Jupiter, and their planetary siblings travel in almost concentric circles around the sun. That means that the planets appear just a handful of degrees above or below the sun's apparent path through the sky, called the ecliptic. (The ecliptic is really the Earth's orbital plane, but from our perspective it appears as though the sun is in motion.)

The Earth's orbital plane is only tilted a little relative to the average plane of the solar system, called the invariable plane, Volk tells Space.com.

"That's why, as we're watching them in the sky, they're all kind of following a path along the ecliptic plane."

It's all reflective of how the sun and the planets formed, said Volk.

"When the sun was being born out of some cloud of gas and dust, it was collapsing down to form the star. Then, angular momentum caused the material surrounding that [star], that didn't make it into the sun, to form a disk that is rotating and orbiting around the star. The really massive bodies in the solar system  — the planets  — tended to form within that disk," said Volk.

But no two stars are the same. Some systems deviate significantly from this proto-structure. "If there's another Earth out there, there's no guarantee that the observers on that 'Earth' would see the same kind of nice ecliptic plane that we see in our solar system."

Our cosmic neighborhood is flat and relatively circular, but that is not universal. "The sun isn't by itself in the galaxy," said Volk. "A lot of stars form in clusters. Sometimes stars actually interrupt and interact with each other," which could boot baby planets into a "wider range of inclinations."

Larger planetary tilts may have happened in the ancient past to our solar system. But after the gas giants migrated from nearer to the sun to the cold reaches they inhabit today, the inner planets and the remaining mass of small bodies like comets and asteroids likely helped to balance out their orbits.

As a result, Earth gets to inhabit what's known as a "dynamically cold" configuration. The planets coast past one another on the ecliptic, and appear to us to nuzzle one another every so often.

The planetary dance and life on Earth

These celestial musings are a symptom of a solar system that supports life on Earth. Orbital dynamics control the distance a planet is from the star, and how stable the planet will be throughout its trip.

Exoplanets with orbits tilted with respect to their invariable plane could disrupt the rest of their system. They could perturb the circular and flat configuration that supports worlds like Earth that have water — an essential ingredient for life as we know it — and the 'Goldilocks' distance year round from a star.

"If our planet's orbit was really elongated, you'd have different intensities with sunlight throughout the year. That would be an additional complication on the climate," said Volk.

"Orbital dynamics allows you to start to think about all those fun, different aspects of what makes our planet habitable, and ask how normal it is to have a habitable planet."

Get ready for a spectacular sight tonight (June 9), as Jupiter and Venus make a close approach in the evening sky, while Mercury shines close to the western horizon in the glow of the setting sun.

Stargazers in the U.S. will see the bright light of Venus glowing less than 20 degrees above the horizon at sunset — roughly the width of two clenched fists held at arm's length — with Jupiter to its lower left. Mercury, meanwhile, is more challenging to spot, as it shines approximately 10 degrees below and to the lower right of the pair, requiring a clear view to the west.

Venus and Jupiter will be separated by less than 2 degrees in the night sky — close enough to share the field of view of a pair of 10x50 binoculars. You may also be able to spot Jupiter's four Galilean moons — Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede — appearing as tiny star-like points of light surrounding the gas giant.

The following nights will see Venus rise above Jupiter as it tracks a path toward the heart of the nearby constellation Cancer, where it will shine with the open star cluster Messier 44 — also known as Praesepe or the Beehive Cluster — on June 20.

Jupiter, meanwhile, will be progressively harder to spot following its rendezvous with Venus on June 9, appearing fractionally lower on the horizon with each passing night. By early July, the gas giant will be a challenge to spot in the glow of the setting sun, and won't be seen again until mid-August, when it reappears in the eastern morning sky.

Want to get a closer look at the planets? Then be sure to read our roundup of the best telescopes available in 2026. If you're a photographer, then you may also want to read our guide to the top smart telescopes for capturing the night sky, along with our picks of the most capable cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The June evening sky this year is exceptionally interesting.

A spectacular gathering of three planets, two bright stars, plus, later this month, a slender crescent moon, will be the chief celestial attraction in the evening sky during the next few weeks. It will, in fact, be possible for anyone with a clear and unobstructed view of the western sky to see all three planets at a single glance.

And two of these planets — Venus and Jupiter — are by far the brightest of those that are readily visible with the unaided eye. In fact, on one particular evening, Tuesday, June 9, these two worlds will seem to "call attention to themselves," even to those who normally do not look up into the night sky.

Jupiter and Venus draw together

No doubt during the past week or so, even casual sky watchers have already taken note of Venus and Jupiter in the guise of two very bright "stars" that have been evident in the west-northwest sky for at least a couple of hours after sunset.

Both shine with a silvery-white luster and one — Venus — appears considerably brighter. And especially noticeable over the course of recent nights is that they seem to be drawing closer to each other. In fact, at this moment in time, from our earthly viewpoint, they literally are like two celestial ships passing in the night. Jupiter will appear about one-seventh as bright as Venus.

On June 7, the two planets will appear side-by-side as they descend toward the horizon, with Jupiter on the left and Venus on the right. They'll be separated by 2.3 degrees. On June 8, Venus will have moved to the upper right of Jupiter, the gap between them having been reduced to 1.8 degrees.

As we have just noted, the two planets will appear closest on June 9. The actual closest approach, with Venus sliding just 1.6 degrees above (north) of Jupiter, will take place at 12 hours Universal Time (UT), which is during the daytime for North America. At that time, just over three times the apparent width of the full moon will separate these two planets. Nonetheless, even though they will already be in the process of slowly separating as darkness falls later that evening, the two planets will still appear practically as close as they were just hours before.

Thereafter, Jupiter will appear to drop rapidly away from Venus, setting progressively earlier and becoming more and more deeply immersed in the bright evening twilight during the balance of June. It will likely disappear in early July.

Venus, on the other hand, reaches its highest altitude in the western evening twilight during June for this current apparition and captures the gaze of millions. All through June, it will appear each evening more than 25 degrees high in the west right after sunset and will not drop below the horizon until at least 2.5 hours later. During this time, Venus will be setting unusually late in the evening, not disappearing beyond the west-northwest horizon until after 11 p.m.

Mercury joins the lineup

While all this is taking place, a third planet will be evident below Venus and Jupiter. That third planet will be Mercury.

Mercury is often cited as the most difficult of the five bright planets to see. Called an "inferior planet" because its orbit is nearer to the sun than the Earth's, Mercury –scarcely more than half as far from the sun as Venus is — always appears from our vantage point to be in the same general direction as the sun and it's usually lost in the sunlight. Yet it's not really that hard to see. You simply must know when and where to look and find a clear horizon.

And for those living in the Northern Hemisphere, a great "window of opportunity" for viewing this rocky little world in the evening sky has just opened. That window, in fact, will remain open through at least June 22, giving you an ample number of chances to see this so-called "elusive planet" with your own eyes.

Currently, Mercury is visible about 45 minutes after sunset. You can use Venus to guide you to Mercury. Just look low toward the west-northwest horizon and you'll readily see Venus shining brightly in the twilight sky. Then look about 15 degrees below and to the right of Venus — your clenched fist held at arm's length measures 10 degrees. Much fainter Mercury will be roughly "one and half fists" from Venus and will be shining with just a trace of a yellowish-orange tinge.

And Mercury will be shining at a very respectable magnitude of -0.2, rivaling orange Arcturus, the fourth brightest star in brilliance. Venus, however, will appear some 33 times brighter.

In the evenings that follow, Mercury will slowly diminish in brightness, but it will also slowly gain altitude as it gradually moves away from the vicinity of the sun. It will achieve its greatest eastern elongation — its greatest angular distance when it will be 25 degrees removed from the sun at magnitude +0.4 — on June 15.

By the evening of June 23, Mercury's brightness will have dropped to magnitude +1.3, equal to the star Regulus in Leo; only one-quarter as bright as it was on June 5. In telescopes, it will appear as a narrowing crescent phase. This will probably be your last view of it. Thereafter, the combination of its lowering altitude, plus its descent into a much-brighter sunset glow, should finally render Mercury invisible. It will pass through inferior conjunction — between the sun and Earth — on July 12.

Enter Gemini's twin stars

Amidst this planet array is a pair of bright stars: Pollux and Castor. They are often considered winter stars, though they remain evident in the west-northwest sky well into the spring. They are the brightest stars in the zodiacal constellation of Gemini, the Latin word for "twins." The two stars represent their heads.

Pollux is slightly brighter (1st magnitude with a slight orange-yellow color) and Castor (2nd magnitude, white). They are a scant 4.5 degrees apart, making good measuring points. In telescopes, Castor is more interesting: it is one of the many "double" stars in the sky. As a matter of fact, it's a triple star, and each of its three components is a double star (six in all!). Through it all, the Twins serve as bystanders, seemingly watching as Venus, Jupiter and Mercury scurry past them during the first three weeks of June.

The moon completes the show

The moon, our nearest neighbor in space, will join the planetary/stellar parade during the third week of June. On June 16, it will appear as a slender sliver of light, just two days past new phase and sitting a little less than 3 degrees above Mercury and 5 degrees to the lower right of Jupiter. Then on June 17, the slightly wider lunar crescent will appear just a couple of degrees to the left of brilliant Venus; the two brightest objects in the night sky adorning the west-northwest evening sky.

Here is a chance to see for yourself that nearby solar system objects generally seem to move faster than more distant ones. Indeed, on June 16 and June 17, as darkness falls, we will have a configuration laid out before us consisting of the moon at 224,000 miles (361,000 km) from Earth; Mercury at 75 million miles (120 million km); Venus at 107 million miles (171 million km) and Jupiter at 568 million miles (914 million km). The motion of the moon can be detected with the naked eye in less than an hour, that of Mercury and Venus from night to night, but Jupiter's travel among the background stars is not very noticeable in even a week. In small telescopes, each object has high interest: Mercury and Venus for their phases, Jupiter for its cloud belts and four Galilean satellites, and finally the moon for its rich surface detail.

The planets in the night sky are always shifting in and out of celestial liaisons and a wide variety of different conjunctions and configurations typically occur during any given year. It is highly unusual, however, when three or more bright planets appear to reside in the same area of the sky. So, in the evenings ahead, everyone should make a concerted effort to go out and look, since similar planet gatherings will be few and far between in the future.

Incidentally, the next time such a favorable June gathering of Mercury, Venus and Jupiter along with Pollux and Castor and the crescent moon occurs again won't come until the year 2085! In fact, on June 14 of that year, those three planets will form an eye-catching compact triangle less than 2 degrees wide.

Mark your calendars.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

Don't miss Jupiter, Venus and Mercury put on a spectacular show as they line up in the evening sky on May 27, creating a 'planetary bridge' between the constellations of Gemini and Taurus.

Jupiter will shine as a steady point of light roughly 30 degrees above the western horizon at sunset, with Venus appearing as a bright star-like object to its lower right. Mercury will complete the line-up, glistening close to the horizon, but will prove a greater challenge to spot in the glow of the setting sun.

Wait until the sun is safely below the horizon before turning your binoculars or a small telescope on Jupiter. Don't forget, you can use a trusted resource like Time and Date's daylight tracker to discover exactly when the sun will set from your location.

With clear skies and a small telescope or pair of binoculars, you should be able to spot four bright points of light clustered around the gas giant's glowing disk, representing the four large Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

A 4-inch scope should allow you to pick out the moon-like phases of Venus, while a larger 6 to 8-inch telescope will help reveal the multicoloured cloud bands that line Jupiter's atmosphere, along with colossal storms that dwarf the most ferocious weather systems of Earth.

Mercury will set less than 90 minutes after the sun on May 27 for viewers in the U.S., with Venus slipping below the western horizon roughly an hour later. Jupiter, meanwhile, will linger later in the western sky, finally disappearing shortly before midnight alongside the bright stars Castor and Pollux, which represent the heads of the celestial twins in the constellation Gemini.

Want to get a closer look at Jupiter and the other worlds of the solar system? Then be sure to check out our roundups of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the night sky, while photographers should read up on our picks for the top cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you snap a photo of the planetary line-up and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your image(s) alongside your comments, name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The crescent moon and Venus put on a spectacular show for skywatchers worldwide during a dramatic close approach in the evening sky earlier this week. Read on to see a selection of gorgeous photos of the cosmic rendezvous, captured from around the world.

Photographers captured the razor-thin lunar crescent just a few days after the new moon phase on May 16, as sunlight reflected from Earth's surface and atmosphere bathed the shadowed expanse of the moon's disk in a soft glow, known as earthshine..

Venus, meanwhile, appeared as a dazzling star-like object that accompanied the moon through the late spring sky, setting the stage for a gorgeous photoshoot as the duo lit the night above cityscapes and historic landmarks.

Stunning photos of the May's lunar conjunction of Venus and the moon

Meng Zhongde spied Venus and the moon shining in the twilight sky over the Hainan Province of China on May 19, with earthshine illuminating the lunar disk as reflected sunlight poured into the night from its glowing crescent.

Photographer Gary Hershorn captured a dazzling photo of Venus shining to the left of the crescent moon above the One World Trade Center on May 18, as the glow of dusk illuminated the New York City skyline.

Hershorn also snapped a well-timed shot of a passenger aircraft speeding through the skies above Manhattan alongside the celestial duo that same night, before the 7%-lit crescent moon slipped from view below the western horizon.

Giuseppe Pappa took a mathematical approach to the celestial event, by photographing the moon, Venus and the gas giant Jupiter in the skies over Catania, Italy on May 19 before calculating the angles between them.

"The three celestial bodies aligned perfectly in the evening sky, forming a geometric isosceles triangle," Pappa told Space.com in an email. "Jupiter (top left) and Venus (bottom right) sit at the base of the triangle with an identical angle of 10°. The Moon rests at the vertex(V), in the center of the scene, creating a wide 160° angle."

Photographer Paolo Palma caught Venus peeking through the columns in the dome of the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome. during the conjunction. "Venus is captured through the slender windows of the dome's lantern, almost as if it were the flame itself," Palma told Space.com in an email.

"When the sky was almost completely dark, I noticed a small slit in the dome's lantern that seemed relatively aligned with the path the planet would take in the coming minutes," Palma said. "And so, once I had confirmed that the planet was indeed visible through that small opening, after a few attempts, I managed to capture it, even though it remained visible for only a few seconds."

"Every evening, the night sky reveals itself as a book full of surprises," Palma added.

This view of the moon and Venus — often called "Earth's twin" due to its similar size and rocky composition — was taken by Pradeep Dambarage as they hung over the silhouetted treetops of a forest in Linköping, Sweden. The photo reveals subtle imperfections in the arc of the moon's crescent, created as sunlight fell on craters and broken terrain lining the shadowy divide separating night from day on the lunar surface.

Photographer Bill Ingalls spied that same scene unfolding above the Mary W. Jackson building at NASA's headquarters in Washington D.C., as the agency's iconic blue, red and white "Meatball" logo dominates the shot.

Tahir Turan Eroglu captured another gorgeous view of the young moon and Venus, as earthshine reveals the dark silhouettes of lunar seas scarring the lunar surface, where lava flows had solidified billions of years ago to form sweeping basaltic plains.

Want to know more about Venus? Then be sure to read our explainer article detailing everything you need to know about the rocky planet, along with these 10 fascinating facts about the moon.

If you're looking for a closer look at the planets then you'd do well to read our roundups of the top telescopes available in 2026. If photography is your thing then why not also peruse our picks of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography?

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Look west after sunset tonight (May 21) to see the crescent moon shining alongside the Beehive Cluster in the constellation Cancer, while Jupiter, Venus and elusive Mercury line up nearby in the evening sky.

The silvery curl of the crescent moon will hang low over the western horizon as the sun slips from view, less than 5 degrees to the upper left of the Beehive star cluster, which is also known as Messier 44, or Praesepe.

Jupiter will shine brightly about 20 degrees to the lower right of the moon, while Venus and Mercury form a diagonal line beyond. Mercury — the lowest of the planetary trio — will sit less than 5 degrees above the horizon. You'll need a clear view to the west, but even then you may struggle to spot it in the yellow glow of the retreating sun.

Both the moon and the Beehive Cluster will fit neatly in the field of view of a pair of 10X50 binoculars, which help reveal the brightest of its young stars in the waxing glow of the 36%-lit lunar disk.

A small backyard telescope will bring a plethora of diverse craters and dark lunar seas into view. Look out for Theophilus crater, which sits close to the line separating night from day — known as the terminator — and the Piccolomini impact site, which scars the lunar surface further to the south.

Both craters feature prominent central peaks formed from rock that rebounded inwards following the violent impact that heralded their creation. Their terraced eastern walls will also appear filled with shadow on May 21, making for a dramatic sight.

The moon will gently drift away from M44 as the hours wear on, before finally setting below the horizon in the early hours of May 22.

Interested in capturing glorious photos of the night sky for yourself? Then be sure to read our beginner's guide to photographing the night sky, along with our picks of the best lenses and cameras for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

By now, you have almost certainly noticed dazzling Venus glowing in the western sky soon after sunset. Tonight (May 18), the brilliant planet will be joined by a slender crescent moon just 2.1 days past the new moon and only 7% illuminated.

Whenever these two objects pair off, they always attract attention even when they are not particularly close together.

Your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees, and tonight, you will find our natural satellite situated about 3 degrees — or about one-third of a fist — to the right of Venus.

Ever wonder which is brighter, Venus or the crescent moon?

Many will probably say Venus because it appears as a small, sharp point of light, but it is the moon that is the brighter of the two. Currently, Venus shines at an eye-popping magnitude of -4.0, but the crescent moon, thin as it is, is magnitude -7.1 or 17 times brighter! It might be difficult to accept this, but the reason is that the moon's light is spread out over a much larger area compared to Venus, thus making it appear dimmer.

And of course, what we see is an illusion of perspective; the moon and Venus are nowhere near each other in space. The moon is 224,000 miles (360,000 km) from Earth, while Venus is 124 million miles (200 million km) away. But on Monday, they will be lined up in such a manner to appear relatively close to each other.

During May, Venus's elongation from the sun increases from 24 to 32 degrees and from north temperate latitudes, making it easy to spot — hanging in the western sky at dusk and nearing the peak of its not very lofty 2026 apparition. It's some 10 to 20 degrees to the east of the sun and 25 degrees above the horizon. Because a bright sky helps subdue Venus's glare, this is a good time to inspect the planet telescopically, though its gibbous disk remains rather small and approximately seven-eighths illuminated.

Venus sets around 10:50 p.m. local daylight time. During the second week of June, when it will be at the pinnacle of its current evening visibility, it will set just after 11 p.m.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

The May new moon arrives this weekend, ushering in several dark moonless nights perfect for exploring the majesty of our Milky Way, glimmering spring constellations and the ever-shifting procession of the planets.

May's new moon phase occurs at 4:01 p.m. EDT (2001 GMT) on May 16, as the moon passes close to the sun in the daytime sky.

The nights surrounding the new moon present beautifully dark skies for stargazers looking to navigate the sea of stars, nebulas and galaxies that haunt the post-sunset realm.

Visible planets

Turn your gaze west at sunset to spot Venus glowing as a bright "evening star" a little over 20 degrees above the horizon — roughly the width of two clenched fists held at arm's length against the night sky.

Jupiter glows another 20 degrees to the upper left of Venus, with Castor and Pollux, the brightest stars in the constellation Gemini, shining above. A pair of 10X50 binoculars will reveal a shoal of star-like objects surrounding the gas giant. These are Jupiter's largest natural satellites Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, which are collectively known as the Galilean Moons in honor of their discoverer, the famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei.

Early birds are treated to an entirely different cast of planets as Saturn shines above the eastern horizon in the hour preceding dawn, with Mars rising to its lower left, chased by the golden light of the coming sun. Both Saturn and Mars will cling less than 20 degrees above the horizon at sunrise, so be sure to find a spot with a clear view to the east if you want to catch the planetary duo before they're lost in the glare of the sun.

Stars and constellations

May's new moon is a great time to spot a trio of celestial animals shining in the spring sky. Our first target is the great lion represented in the constellation Leo, whose mane and chest are represented by a sickle-like formation of stars that shines above the southwestern horizon after sunset in May, with Regulus at its lowest point.

The second-century Greek philosopher Ptolemy catalogued the constellation almost 2,000 years ago, seeing in it the Nemean Lion from the mythological tale of Heracles, which the hero was burdened with slaying as the first of his 12 labors.

Next, look 10 degrees above Leo's sickle head to find the faint stars of the constellation Leo Minor, the "little lion". This constellation was created by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in the year 1690. As a result, there are no great mythological tales of its origin, though it remains a pretty feature between the greater stellar citadels of Leo and Ursa Major.

To the lower right of Leo Minor is the magnitude +3.25 star Alpha Lyncis, which forms the leftmost point of the constellation Lynx — a serpentine formation of eight stars that stretches off to the right above the northwestern horizon for viewers in the Northern Hemisphere. Dark skies surrounding the new moon make Lynx much easier to trace, as it is often hidden in the glare of Earth's satellite.

Our final target is the glowing core of the Milky Way, which puts on a magnificent show between midnight and dawn in mid-May, as it arcs high over the southeastern horizon. A good way to spot the Milky Way is by locating the three bright stars Altair, Vega and Deneb, forming a famous asterism known as the Summer Triangle above the eastern horizon this time of year

The dense starfield and dark interstellar dust clouds of the galactic core appear as a glowing band passing through Deneb and between Vega and Altair, as it tumbles towards the horizon.

Read more: Learn the night sky without an app: May's easiest star-hops for beginners

Natural light pollution will be at a minimum, so why not also try to head away from bright city lights to make the most of the monthly pocket of darkness? You can use a trusted website like DarkSky.org to find your ideal stargazing location, along with smartphone astronomy applications like Stellarium or Star Walk 2 to find — or identify — breathtaking night sky objects and constellations in the night sky.

Want to capture your own gorgeous views of our galaxy? Then be sure to read our beginner's guide to photographing the Milky Way, along with our roundups of the top cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your dark sky astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

"What's that bright light in the sky?" a friend messaged me the other evening. "Venus," I replied, without thinking about it. There was a pause, then: "How can you tell? And why is it suddenly so bright?"

People always notice Venus by accident. When it's low on the horizon after dark, but just high enough and bright enough, it suddenly becomes obvious. It's why Venus has a reputation for triggering UFO reports whenever it becomes the "Evening Star."

Nothing mysterious is happening — it's just the latest installment of a predictable eight-year pattern during which Venus orbits the sun 13 times and completes five apparent circuits around the sky, as seen from Earth. Each circuit includes one period when Venus appears east of the sun in the evening sky — becoming the Evening Star — and one period when it appears west of the sun before dawn as the Morning Star.

So, Venus becomes the Evening Star for a few months about five times every eight years. As a mathematical pattern, it's exquisite and — in my opinion — quietly awesome — but it's virtually unknown.

The good news, of course, is that after passing behind the sun earlier this year, the second planet from the sun is now rising to dominate as the "Evening Star" — and is set to be the centerpiece in a spectacular "summer of Venus."

What's happening and when to look at Venus

Right now, Venus is emerging into one of its evening apparitions — and beginning a slow, spectacular climb.

At the moment, Venus is about 84% illuminated — a gibbous phase — and decreasing. But that's not the key to its brightness. What matters is what it's doing.

Venus is currently moving along its orbit, bringing it closer to Earth. Night by night, the distance between our two planets is shrinking. As it does, Venus appears larger in the sky — and that increase in apparent size more than compensates for the fact that we're seeing less of its sunlit side.

So over the coming months, two things happen at once: Venus grows larger as it approaches Earth, and its phase shrinks from gibbous to a thin crescent. The result is counterintuitive: Venus gets brighter as it becomes less full.

By early June, Venus will be prominent well into the night, with key moments including:

• May 18 — Venus in conjunction with a 7%-lit waxing crescent moon
• May 20 — Venus is close to M35, an open cluster of stars about 150 million years old, in the constellation Gemini.
• June 9 — Venus passes closest to Jupiter in a striking evening conjunction low in the west.
• Early June — Venus reaches its highest altitude as the ecliptic stands steeply to the horizon in the evening sky after sunset, making it easier to see for longer.
• July 9 — Venus glides close to Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo.
• August 12 — Venus will be 50% lit, thereafter being in its waning crescent phase, and becoming interesting in a telescope.
• August 15 — Venus, in conjunction with a 13%-lit waxing crescent moon, reaches its greatest elongation east, its widest separation from the sun.
• September 18 — Venus hits peak brightness (its "greatest illuminated extent") at around magnitude -4.8, outshining everything in the night sky except the moon.

How and when I'm watching Venus

Summer 2026 will be a great one for stargazers, with perhaps the highlight being August 12's triple header — a total solar eclipse (albeit only total in Greenland, Iceland and Spain, but visible as a partial across northwestern Europe), the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, and Venus entering its dazzling crescent phase.

I generally don't make a big deal of observing Venus when it's the Evening Star. If I'm camping or renting a cottage in the country, I'll check the aspect. Still, mostly I observe it casually, from my backyard after dinner, and when walking home, pausing on the sidewalk for a minute before going inside. I look west, find it quickly, and take a mental note. Is it higher than yesterday? Is it getting brighter? That's usually enough because what you're really watching is a nearby world overtaking us on the inside track.

There are exceptions to my casual planet-gazing. One is the Venus-Jupiter conjunction on June 9. The other is its greatest brilliancy on September 18, when it will be just 26% lit. This is when it shines at its absolute brightest — the turning point of the entire cycle.

By then, Venus is much closer to Earth, so its apparent disk has swollen dramatically. Even though only a crescent is sunlit, that crescent is huge in angular size — reflecting far more total light toward us than when it appeared smaller and fuller. It's a perfect balance between phase, distance and the high albedo of its global cloud deck. Not too far, not too thin, and just cloudy enough — just the point where geometry and meteorology deliver maximum brilliance.

With educated eyes, the question changes from, "What is that bright light?" to "Where is Venus in its journey?" Watching Venus rise and fall is going to be one of the highlights of summer.

Stargazer's corner: May 15-21, 2026

With a new moon on Saturday, May 16, this coming week is perfect for watching a crescent wax in the west just after sunset. On Monday, May 18, a 7%-illuminated crescent will hang about two degrees from Venus, with Jupiter about 20 degrees above. The distance between Venus and Jupiter will reduce with every passing night until they appear to pass close to each other on June 9 in a stunning close conjunction. Turn southeast, and you'll find Arcturus high in the sky with Spica lower down, while Vega rises in the northeast.

Constellation of the week: Corvus

Corvus is not a famous constellation, but it should be. Supposedly a crow or a raven, but looking more like a sail, Corvus is five stars that form a small, slightly skewed quadrilateral that stands out because it's in a part of the sky filled with faint constellations. Always low in the south during spring and summer, this week, Corvus is just below the right of bright star Spica. Its four brightest stars — Gienah, Algorab, Kraz and Minkar — are relatively easy to find, but it's the fifth star, Alchiba, which is very close to Algorab, but outside the sail, that gives Corvus its distinctive shape. Corvus is easy to overlook, but once you see it, you won't forget it.

My latest stargazing obsession

The night sky is a map, but it's always moving. That happens simply because Earth revolves, but the planets also move across the sky, further complicating things. It's why stargazers think in terms of separation — how far one thing sits from another — rather than looking for objects in the sky at fixed points. You'll often hear that the moon is five degrees from a planet, or that two planets are within a single degree. The night sky is a sphere, and we see 180° from horizon to horizon, with 90° directly above (the zenith). A simple way to measure degrees of distance is to use your outstretched hand as a scale. A finger-width is about a degree, three middle fingers are five degrees, and a fist is 10 degrees, giving you a rough but reliable measure of angular distance. By estimating distances in the night sky, you begin to read it, navigate it, and know it. It's what stargazing for life is all about.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

A monstrous bank of cloud 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) long that sweeps around Venus every few days is being generated by rising sulfuric acid vapor pushed high into the atmosphere by what is essentially the same phenomenon that describes how water from a running tap spreads out in the basin of your kitchen sink.

In 2016, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)'s Akatsuki mission to Venus discovered the bank of clouds some 31 miles (50 km) up in Venus' dense Venus' dense atmosphere. The weather system is aligned with the planet's equator, but scientists have been unable to explain its immense size, velocity and its noticeably sharp leading edge.

The mystery has, however, only lasted ten years. By creating mathematical models that describe the dynamical flow of gas and how pockets of gas rise, an international team of astronomers has now worked out the source of this huge atmospheric phenomenon. The answer is something called a "hydraulic jump," which occurs when a gas or fluid that is shallow but fast moving suddenly slows while becoming deeper. An everyday example is water flowing out from a tap into the basin of your kitchen sink; where it strikes the bottom of the basin, it is initially shallow but fast moving, but as the water spreads out it rapidly becomes deep and slower.

A similar thing happens in Venus's atmosphere, which is made almost entirely of carbon dioxide along with a small amount of nitrogen and trace amounts of other gases including sulfur dioxide, which can form clouds. Not too high above Venus's scorched surface there propagates an eastward-moving atmospheric wave. It's a planetary wave, meaning that it spans thousands of kilometers and is focused on the planet's equatorial region. (Venus itself has a diameter of 7,520 miles/ 12,104 kilometers, so a 3,700-mile/6,000-kilometer-wide wave is quite significant.)

On Earth we would call such a wave a 'Kelvin wave', and they can occur in the ocean as well as the atmosphere. Of course, with a surface temperature in excess of 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 degrees Celsius), Venus has no oceans and its Kelvin wave is purely in its atmosphere.

When Venus's Kelvin wave slows, it instigates a hydraulic jump, and this allows a powerful updraft of sulfuric acid vapor to rise up to an altitude of about 31 miles (50 kilometers), where it condenses into a bank of sulfuric acid clouds of scarily enormous proportions. These clouds then start to trail behind the Kelvin wave that marks the leading edge of the cloud bank.

"We're now able to show that this cloud disruption is caused by the largest known hydraulic jump in the solar system," said study leader Takeshi Imamura, from the University of Tokyo, in a statement. "Our discovery of the hydraulic jump on Venus connecting a very large-scale horizontal process with a strong localized vertical wave is unexpected, as in fluid dynamics these are usually disconnected."

The discovery is the first time that a hydraulic jump has been found on a planet beyond Earth. So the fact that Venus's hydraulic jump behaves in unexpected ways should perhaps not be too surprising, and is a reminder that atmospheric phenomena on other planets can vary wildly from what we experience on our planet.

And Venus's atmosphere is very different to Earth's — rich in carbon dioxide, so oppressive as to create a crushing surface pressure of 92 bar and super-rotating around Venus, so that its atmosphere rotates around the planet in just four Earth days whereas the solid body of Venus takes 243 days to complete one rotation.

The discovery also plugs a gap in our understanding of Venus's dense atmosphere.

"Up until now, we used a global circulation model for Venus that is similar to Earth's, but this model doesn't include the hydraulic jump that we have now identified," said Imamura. "Our next step will be to test this discovery with a more inclusive climate model that includes other atmospheric processes. We will face some challenges due to the huge amount of processing power required to run such simulations. Even with modern supercomputers, it isn't easy."

The findings of Imamura's team were published on April 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research — Planets.

With evidence increasingly showing that volcanism is active on the surface of Venus today, a team of geologists have shown how satellite data intended to help scientists better understand volcanic eruptions on Earth could be applied to lava flows on Venus, too.

The vast majority of Venus has been resurfaced by volcanism over the past half-billion years, and more than 85,000 volcanoes have been identified on the Venusian surface in radar images. It had been thought that this volcanism took place all in one big burst 500 million years ago, but a recent new look at old radar data from NASA's Magellan mission to Venus in the 1990s has identified what seems to be active volcanism. Additional evidence comes from atmospheric gases (excesses of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and molecular nitrogen), although no direct evidence in the form of volcanic plumes, for example, has been found yet.

A future mission to Venus such as NASA's VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy), which the agency hopes to launch in the early 2030s, might discover recent lava flows on the second planet from the sun. Ascertaining how old those lava flows are would be of utmost importance.

"When we search for active lava flows on other planets, knowing how long it takes for lava to cool on Earth will help us better understand what's happening if we see a hot flow on Venus," said geologist Ian Flynn of the University of Pittsburgh in a statement.

Flynn's involvement stems from his work studying Mauna Loa, a volcanic island in Hawaii that is the most active large volcano on Earth, having erupted 34 times since 1843, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The most recent eruption lasted 13 days in November and December 2022, when lava flows came within 1.7 miles (2.8 kilometers) of the Daniel K. Inouye State Highway 200, also known as Saddle Road, which is a major thoroughfare on the island.

The proximity of the volcano's lava flows to human activity made monitoring the eruption crucial. Usually scientists use government-funded monitoring satellites to do this, but they are few in number. So Flynn's colleague Michael Ramsay suggested using data from privately owned satellites, which have been launching into space in great numbers recently.

Flynn was able to monitor the creeping lava flow using the private and public data combined, but its usefulness didn't stop there. Knowing when a volcano will erupt is the holy grail of vulcanism, but until now geologists have not found the secret of predicting when a volcano will explode.

However, working with Claudia Corradino of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Flynn and his colleagues were able to look back at the data leading up to Mauna Loa's 2022 eruption. By applying machine learning, they noticed a buildup in underground heat one month before the beginning of the eruption.

Why stop there? When looking down at an eruption from low Earth orbit, the observations are presented in flat 2D. Yet the thickness of a lava flow has a large say on how long it flows for and how quickly it cools. So Flynn then teamed up with Shashank Bhushan from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Bhushan had previously measured the thickness of flowing glaciers using data from satellites, and with his expertise they were able to measure the thickness of the Mauna Loa lava flows and turn the data from 2D to 3D.

"Getting visible data helped us understand where it's going," said Flynn. "Now we can also generate flow thickness and understand how much material is coming out."

They found that lava flows thicker than 20 meters (66 feet) took about 21 months to cool.

This information helps tell scientists whether an eruption has just begun or is one the wane, while the cooling rate can also inform us as to the elemental and mineral composition of the lava. This has clear importance for the possibility of identifying lava flows on Venus and wanting to learn their history, and in turn figure out just how volcanically active Venus is today.

"Knowing how lava cools enables scientists to better constrain our models when we find active volcanoes on other planets," said Flynn.

The findings will appear in the June 2026 issue of the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research.

Look to the western sky about 30-90 minutes after sunset on April 19 for a fleeting but incredible sight, as the razor-thin crescent moon shines above the Pleiades open star cluster and Venus in the early spring sky.

The upturned 11%-lit waxing crescent moon will shine approximately 20 degrees above the western horizon — the width of two clenched fists held at arm's length — just two days after the new moon on April 17.

A cluster of stars surrounded by a diffuse glow should be visible to the lower right of the thin lunar crescent. That's the Pleiades, a collection of over 1,000 blue-white stellar bodies colloquially known as the Seven Sisters, after its most prominent members: Asterope, Alcyone, Celaeno, Electra, Maia, Taygete and Merope.

Venus will be visible below the moon, appearing as a bright evening star setting just two hours after the sun, so be sure to find a clear view of the western horizon if you hope to see the three striking objects come close to lining up in the evening sky!

The ice giant Uranus will lurk 5 degrees to the upper right of Venus at a magnitude, or brightness, of just +5.8, making it almost impossible to spot with the naked eye. Its proximity to the horizon will make it even more challenging to spot on the evening of April 19. However, a pair of binoculars or a telescope may allow you to resolve its tiny greenish disk hanging in the blackness of space.

You may notice a soft glow illuminating the shadowed side of the lunar disk as it glides silently towards the horizon, as sunlight bounces off Earth's cloudy surface to strike its natural satellite. The phenomenon — known as "earthshine", the "Da Vinci Glow", or "the old moon in the new moon's arms"- is most easily seen on the nights surrounding the new moon phase, when the angle between the moon and Earth leaves them well positioned to share our sun's light.

Want to see the wonders of the cosmos for yourself but aren't sure where to start? Then why not check out our beginner's guide to stargazing, along with our picks of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the post-sunset realm.

Editor's Note: If you capture a photo of the moon and Pleiades and want to share it with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

The April new moon has arrived bringing several nights of spectacular dark skies perfect for observing the planets of the solar system, majestic constellations and the galaxies that lie beyond.

April's new moon occurs at 7:52 a.m. EDT (1152 GMT) on April 17, when the moon is positioned between the sun and Earth, rendering it lost from sight in the daytime sky, with the entirety of its near side bathed in shadow.

The moonless nights surrounding this phase are the perfect time to indulge in skywatching and night sky photography, as subtle constellations and deep sky objects often lost behind a veil of moonlight glisten in the twilight realm.

Visible planets

Look to the west shortly after sunset on April 17 to find Venus appearing as a bright evening star 15 degrees from the horizon, with the blue-white stars of the Pleiades open star cluster glowing 10 degrees above — roughly the width of your clenched fist held at arm's length.

The ice giant Uranus can be found a little under 5 degrees to the lower left of the star cluster. It'll be too dim to spot with the naked eye — without exceptionally dark skies and perfect vision — but a pair of binoculars or a small telescope will allow you to spot its disk as a tiny greenish dot, according to telescope manufacturer Celestron.

Jupiter, meanwhile, will shine high overhead, below Castor and Pollux — the brightest stars of the constellation Gemini. Turn a 6-inch telescope on Jupiter and you may notice a line of bright dots extending outward from the gas giant's colorful disk. Those are the Galilean moons Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto!

Head out an hour before sunrise on April 18 and find yourself a clear view to the eastern horizon for a chance to catch a planetary triangle rising in the glow of the coming dawn.

Mars will sit higher in the sky,with Saturn below and Mercury off to the right. Neptune will also be present to the upper right of Mercury, though the distant ice giant will be far too dim to spot with the naked eye.

Stars and constellations

The dark nights surrounding the new moon are a perfect time to explore some of the subtler constellations that glisten in the northern hemisphere sky.

First, locate the sickle-like formation of stars representing the head and chest of the great lion represented in the constellation Leo, which can be found high above the southern horizon in April with the bright star Regulus at its base.

Next, look to the lower right of Regulus to find a circlet of stars representing the head of the great serpent in the constellation Hydra, along with a string of stars that wind down and to the east towards the horizon, which mark its tail. Hydra is the largest constellation in the night sky, though it's often overlooked due to its lack of bright stars.

Perched along Hydra's back are the compact constellations Corvus (the crow) and Crater (the cup). To their east is the blue-white light of Spica — the brightest star in the constellation Virgo.

For a spot of deep sky viewing, why not head out to a dark sky location and sweep your telescope over the patch of sky where Leo, Virgo and the constellation Coma Berenices meet?

First, find Denebola, the star that marks the tail of the lion in Leo, and Vindemiatrix using a handy stargazing app. Roughly halfway between the two is Markarian's Chain — a spectacular string of galaxies whose ancient light can be spied with the aid of a modest telescope.

Read more: Galaxy season: Spring brings deep space wonder to the northern hemisphere night sky.

You could also capture spectacular images of the stars with the help of our beginner's guide to photographing the night sky. Be sure to check out our picks of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the night sky, along with our roundups of the top cameras and lenses for astrophotography available in 2026.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your night sky photography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s) along with your name, location and comments to spacephotos@space.com.

She's back...

After what basically amounted to a winter sabbatical of sorts, having been out of sight since the beginning of December, Venus — by far the most brilliant of the naked-eye planets — is now fully back in view. After having spent much of 2025 as a morning object, Venus has now settled in as a prominent "evening star" for the next five months, becoming a fixture of the western sky.

Our nearest planetary neighbor travels in a nearly perfect circle, 13 times around the sun in 8 Earth years, so that as seen from Earth it appears to make 5 circuits around the sky. Each of the 8 years in this Venus-cycle (known and important to ancient civilizations such as the Mayans and Babylonians) has its own particular pattern, so 2026 repeats (within about 2 or 3 days of the same date) the phenomena of 2018.

Venus passed superior conjunction (appearing to go behind the sun as seen from Earth) back on Jan. 6. Until mid-February it had been invisible, mired deep in the brilliant glare of the sun. Nonetheless, with each passing day, it moved on a slow course toward the east and progressively pulled away from the sun's vicinity.

During March, Venus rapidly climbed out of the bright evening twilight, becoming by far the most brilliant of all the "stars." The interval between sunset and Venus-set during the month increased from nearly 60 minutes to almost 100 minutes. During the final week of March, Venus began setting after the end of astronomical twilight, that is, in a completely dark sky, a circumstance that will persist until late August.

Keeping company with Uranus and the Pleiades

As a bonus for Venus watchers, on April 23, you can use Venus as a "pointer" to locate the planet Uranus. On that evening, Venus passes just three-quarters of a degree to the right of Uranus. Venus will be resplendent at magnitude -3.9 compared to +5.8 magnitude Uranus: a brightness ratio difference of some 7,700-fold! But this close approach will serve as a convenient opportunity for identifying Uranus in a small telescope without the need of consulting a sky map. The seventh planet out from the sun appears as a greenish dot of light in good binoculars or a small telescope. Wait until about 75 minutes after sundown, but be aware that by that time the planet duo will be very low, only about 10 degrees above the west-northwest horizon.

Also on that very same evening, Venus makes its closest approach to the famous Pleiades star cluster, passing about 3½ degrees to their lower left, making for a lovely sight in binoculars. In fact, you probably will be able to fit all three objects, Venus, Uranus and the Pleiades in the field of view of most standard 7-power binoculars.

A June summit meeting

With each passing week, Venus rises higher each evening to adorn the western evening sky from early spring through mid-summer.

By the beginning of June, it will stand nearly 30 degrees above the sunset horizon and set as late as 2 hours and 40 minutes after the sun. Interestingly, the planet's greatest altitude at sunset will also be occurring at this time, when the ecliptic (the apparent path of the sun, moon and planets throughout the year) becomes nearly vertical with respect to the western horizon for observers in northern latitudes.

Also in June, Venus will be a part of a "celestial summit meeting" of sorts, as a fascinating dance of three planets and the moon provides evening enchantment this month. One hour after sunset on June 9, Venus will team up with brilliant Jupiter; this dynamic duo literally calls attention to itself low in the west-northwest sky, separated by only 1.8 degrees. On the 16, a slender crescent moon appears to the lower right of Jupiter, while directly below the moon floats a third bright planet, Mercury. The following evening, the lunar crescent passes just off to the left of Venus. And all the while, in the same general vicinity, seemingly watching this amazing display will be Pollux and Castor, the two stars marking the heads of Gemini the Twins.

On July 9, Venus passes less than one degree above bluish Regulus, the brightest star of Leo, the Lion. Seven days later, although widely separated on Friday, July 17, Venus and a slender (17% illuminated) crescent moon will make for an eye-catching sight in the western sky.

A slow rise to prominence; then a rapid exit

Venus reaches its greatest elongation — its greatest angular distance — 46 degrees to the east of the sun — on Aug. 15, though it will appear about 10 degrees lower compared to where it was during late spring. It is brightest near the very end of summer as it heads back down toward the sun, reaching its greatest illuminated extent (greatest brilliancy) for this apparition on the evening of Sept. 18 at an eye-popping magnitude of –4.8. By then, however, it will only be 10 degrees high at sunset and will be setting just over an hour after the sun. During the last week of September, as it rapidly sinks lower each night, it will appear as a relatively huge and slender crescent. At mid-northern latitudes, we'll have to struggle to catch her very low in the west-southwest soon after sunset during the final days of the month.

Venus then falls rapidly back toward the sun, vanishing from view at the start of October, and passes inferior conjunction on Oct. 24.

Morning "night light"

In November, she sprouts up into the predawn eastern sky to reach an even greater maximum of height in the morning skies of December. If you have a clear view toward the east-southeast, look low to the horizon on Nov. 7, about an hour before sunrise, to see a narrow crescent moon passing below brilliant Venus — and also nearby, the bluish first magnitude star Spica in Virgo the Virgin.

And Christmas 2026 will see Venus mimicking a modern-day Star of Bethlehem, appearing as a glorious "star in the east" before sunrise.

Through a telescope

Between now and October, repeated observation of Venus with a small telescope will show the complete range of its phases and disk sizes. Currently, the planet appears practically full (93% sunlit); a tiny, dazzling gibbous disk. It will start becoming noticeably less gibbous by July 17. On Aug. 12, Venus reaches dichotomy (displaying a "half-moon" shape). Then, for the rest of the year, it appears as a large crescent as it swings near Earth. Indeed, those using telescopes will note that while the Earth-Venus distance is lessening, the apparent size of Venus' disk will grow, doubling from its present size by Aug. 3. When it has doubled again in size on Sept. 23, its large crescent shape should be easily discernible even in steadily held 7-power binoculars.

If you're looking for a telescope or binoculars to observe the night sky, our guides for the best binocular deals and the best telescope deals can help. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help you get ready to capture the next stunning skywatching event.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

NASA's role in a planned Europe-led mission to Venus remains uncertain as budget pressures drive "hard strategic choices" about which missions will be able to continue, Louise Prockter, director of NASA's planetary science division, said on Monday (March 16).

Speaking at a town hall at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, Prockter said NASA is "still in negotiations" with the European Space Agency (ESA) over its role in the planned Envision mission. The January appropriations bill allocated $2.54 billion to the planetary science division for 2026. Although this was higher than the administration’s proposed $1.89 billion, it was still about $200 million less than the prior year, she said, "and that means that not everything can continue forward or continue forward in the same way."

"We're doing our best by Venus," said Prockter, "but it is a tough environment, and not everything can move forward."

The Envision mission, which began construction in 2025, is designed to map Venus' surface and atmosphere in detail from orbit. It is one of three major missions underpinning what scientists have described as a "decade of Venus" exploration, alongside the NASA-led DAVINCI and VERITAS missions.

"It's going to be a challenge getting all three Venus missions to continue," Prockter said.

While NASA is still developing its fiscal year 2026 budget to finalize funding allocations, the 2026 appropriations bill provides $99 million to continue DAVINCI, while work on VERITAS is "ramping up slowly," she said.

Under the original Envision plan, NASA would contribute a key instrument known as VenSAR, a high-resolution radar system intended to map the planet's surface features. However, due to NASA's tightened financial constraints, ESA officials are exploring contingency options to keep Envision on track, including working with member states to develop the radar instrument domestically.

Keeping the mission on schedule is critical, as missing Envision's launch window — no later than 2033 — could delay it by at least three years due to planetary alignment constraints.

Meanwhile, the DAVINCI mission, now expected to launch sooner than previously planned and ahead of the other missions, may be the first to kick off the new wave of Venus exploration. Speaking at the conference on Tuesday (March 17), Natasha Johnson of the Goddard Space Flight Center said the mission now targets a launch for December 2030 — earlier than previous estimates of no sooner than 2031 — driven by what she described as a "rush for science now."

The spacecraft is expected to reach Venus and release its descent probe in January 2033. The probe will transmit data "as fast as it possibly can" as it plummets through the planet's thick atmosphere, capturing measurements and images down to the surface, said Johnson.

And despite persistent funding constraints, the DAVINCI and VERITAS science teams have continued making progress, including field campaigns in analog environments such as Iceland, she added.

"Even though our funding has been very limited, we've still been pressing forward," Johnson said. "We've been doing more with less, in a sense, or we've just been doing as best we can."

Entering a planet's atmosphere is a dangerous maneuver for any spacecraft, as it must withstand the intense frictional heat generated by high-speed contact with atoms and molecules.

That's why landers and rovers have heat shields. And new research from the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign suggests that an atmosphere's composition has a big impact on how heat shields work.

A heat shield "breathes" when it hits the atmosphere. The surface of the shield begins to burn away, in a process called ablation. To mimic the hypersonic speed of a spacecraft's entry, a team of researchers led by Francesco Panerai, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, experimented with heat shields in the Plasmatron X wind tunnel at the Center for Hypersonics and Entry System Studies, which is housed a few blocks from the university's campus.

"What was very surprising about the study is that, when we changed the gas, the ablation phenomenon behaved in different ways," Panerai said in a March 12 statement. "In a classical air environment where you have oxygen present, the ablation happens in a steady way. The flow around the spacecraft erodes the surface, and particles get ejected as a constant stream."

When material from the outer layer of the heat shield erodes, some of it can collect on the surface of the shield, potentially clogging up some areas and preventing the material below from "breathing." This can impact how well the shield performs. In the new study, the researchers found that changing the gases that the shield comes into contact with also changes its performance.

"When the oxygen is removed, this phenomenon becomes unsteady. Intermittent bursts of particles are ejected and, at times, the process becomes violent," Panerai said. "I've been around ablation research for over 15 years, and I've never seen this. We were all really surprised when we first observed this behavior in the tunnel."

Understanding how an atmosphere's composition affects heat shields is important, Panerai said, because NASA is getting Dragonfly, a robotic rotorcraft, ready for a 2028 launch toward the huge Saturn moon Titan. Titan has a thick atmosphere that's quite different from that of Earth: It's composed of about 95% nitrogen and 5% methane, whereas ours is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen.

Dragonfly will study Titan's surface, which could give scientists clues on whether or not the moon's hydrocarbon lakes and rivers hold molecules that are a precursor for life.

"Although this work doesn't directly influence heat shield design, it does have very profound implications on the physics of the material — on the way the material behaves at extreme temperatures," Panerai says. "Understanding at what conditions this phenomenon becomes prominent in flight can help us design better heat shields."

The study was published Feb. 5 in the science journal Carbon.

For the past few weeks, some may have reported a bright "UFO" hovering just above the western horizon right after the sun has gone down. But by the time the sky becomes dark enough for other stars to appear, this bright "mystery object" has vanished.

This strange bright point of light appearing in the evening twilight glow is Venus, known colloquially as "The Evening Star."

From early December, Venus was positioned too close to the sun to be seen. Since late February, however, it has been slowly edging away from the sun, becoming briefly visible just before it sets in bright twilight. By now, however, it has lifted high enough in the sky to be more easily visible, becoming by far the most brilliant of all the "stars." It's currently setting about 90 minutes after the sun and just before the end of evening twilight.

The moon that starts the month

Many calendars, including the Jewish and Muslim, have lunar months defined as beginning with the evenings when the moon first appears. As an example, the "Knife of Time," a poetic term for an extremely thin crescent moon, will hang low in the western twilight on the evening of March 19, heralding the opening of Nisan, the first month of the year A.M. 5786. (A.M. is for Anno Mundi, which dates from the traditional year of the Creation, 3761 B.C.). This expressive description of a young crescent moon appears in the Icelandic Edda of almost 8 centuries ago and accordingly characterizes how the moon's cycles cut the year into convenient segments.

When I used to answer astronomy questions by phone on behalf of New York's Hayden Planetarium, we would get a surge of inquiries as we neared the Islamic month of Ramadan, from people wanting to know "... when would the moon be born again?"

To people who follow a lunar calendar, the first sight of a waxing crescent is of everyday practical importance. Indeed, tracking the moon's phases was probably the basis for the earliest calendars. However, it is difficult to do this accurately because the average phase cycle — called a synodic month — is about 29.53 days, and any synodic cycle can be as much as 6 hours longer or shorter. Given the added uncertainty of the weather, it is easy to understand how confusion could arise over when a new month begins.

Quite often, when people see a narrow crescent, they refer to it as a "new" moon. But properly defined, a new moon is the invisible instant when it's in conjunction with the sun, whereas when sighting a delicate crescent moon, we should refer to it as "young" for an indefinite but short span beginning at the first visibility.

For most of us, the first sighting of a waxing crescent moon in the evening sky usually comes two or three days after the new phase, when the sunlit portion of the moon is roughly equal, respectively, to about 5 to 12%. A crescent moon against the deepening twilight sky is a lovely sight to behold and has become important for some religions.

Venus points the way

As it turns out, on Thursday evening (March 19), Venus can serve as a very useful benchmark to make a sighting of an exceedingly narrow, hairline crescent moon less than 24 hours after the new moon phase. In fact, we might go so far as to say that Venus may be the linchpin to making a successful sighting. Without her, the chances of finding the moon would likely be considerably more difficult.

All you'll need is good vision, a suitably clear and transparent sky and a flat, unobstructed western horizon. Observers should be outside from roughly half an hour to one hour after sunset. This is critical, since the moon will be best visible when it is roughly 2 degrees to 5 degrees above the actual (true) horizon. First, find Venus, which should be rather obvious against the bright twilight sky. Once found, make a fist and hold it out at arm's length. The width of your fist measures roughly 10 degrees. From Venus, your quarry, an exceedingly young crescent moon, will be situated 7 degrees to Venus's lower right.

First try to find it with just your bare eyes, but if unsuccessful, then use binoculars. If you find the crescent first with binoculars, slowly lower them while focusing your gaze at the moon's location to see if you can perceive it without optical aid.

Why this week offers a rare viewing opportunity

Not every new moon offers such a favorable circumstance, for the moment of new moon needs to fall within certain limits of local time. For example, if a new moon were to occur during the late-morning hours, at sunset that day, the crescent moon would be an impossibly hard-to-see eight hours old and much too close to the sun in the sky. This month, the new moon occurs on Wednesday, March 18, at 9:23 p.m. EDT or 6:23 p.m. Pacific Time. With sunset occurring at mid-northern latitudes at around 7:00 p.m., this would be a good time to try and see a crescent moon on the following evening that is less than 24 hours old.

The season of the year is also important. For north temperate latitudes, the best time is around the March equinox, as then the ecliptic — the imaginary coordinate line that serves as the apparent path of the sun, moon and planets — crosses the western horizon most steeply. In such cases, the moon will appear to stand almost directly above the sun's setting point on the horizon. In this upcoming case, the equinox occurs on the very next day!

Also, should the crescent occur close to the time of perigee (closest to the Earth), it will move up and away from the sun into the evening sky more quickly, improving its visibility. As it turns out, the moon arrives at perigee on Sunday, March 22.

Just how thin is this moon?

So, just how thin a moon are we talking about? If the moon were a perfect sphere, the illuminated crescent would arc 180 degrees around the rim of the disk. However, on this occasion, the bright arc will likely subtend only to, at most, 130 degrees and it might even appear to be broken, with bright points appearing where individual mountains are illuminated.

From Atlantic Canada, the moon will be only about 20.6 hours past new, and the width of the sunlit crescent will amount to just one percent. As one heads westward, the difference in time between the moment of new phase and the possible visibility of the moon, as well as the width of the hairline crescent, slowly increases. For those living near and along the Atlantic Seaboard, the moon will be 21.6 hours old and the sunlit crescent measures just 1.1 percent wide. Along the Pacific coast, the moon will have aged to just over 24 hours, but the crescent will still measure a mere 1.4% in width.

To see the moon when less than 24 hours old is an exhilarating experience, appearing so delicately thin that it almost looks like it might break apart! Certainly, if the weather appears favorable in your area on Thursday, you should attempt this very challenging observation.

On the following evening (Friday, March 20), the moon will be nearly two days old, and the crescent will have widened to 5% illuminated. It will also have shifted to a position some eight degrees, almost directly above Venus.

By then, it should be relatively easy for most everyone to see.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope, The Old Farmer's Almanac and other publications.

Russia is apparently getting ready to return to the searing surface of Venus.

The nation wants to launch Venera-D — a multi-vehicle mission involving a lander, balloon and orbiter — to Venus in 2036, Russian state media said on Tuesday (March 10).

Venera-D has been in the works since 2003, according to RussianSpaceWeb. Once upon a time, before Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Venera-D was even considered as a possible joint mission with NASA.

While NASA is no longer collaborating on Russian space projects (apart from the International Space Station), Russia is still moving forward with Venera-D. The mission is said to be part of a suite of robotic spacecraft Russia plans to send to the moon and Venus, which "currently occupy a central place" in the ambitions of Russian space agency Roscosmos, First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov said in an interview with the Razvedchik Journal, which was cited Tuesday by the state-owned Russian outlet TASS.

A new Venus project would extend a series of successful landing missions in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s by previous Venera spacecraft operated by the former Soviet Union, which remains the only nation to have successfully landed and operated spacecraft in the hellish conditions of the Venusian surface.

"Let me remind you that back in 1970, our country succeeded in successfully landing a spacecraft on another planet in the solar system. And that was Venus. Therefore, we will probably move in this direction first," Manturov said.

One of Venera-D's goals will be looking for microbial life in Venus' clouds, following on from disputed recent findings of phosphine and ammonia (possible biomarkers) in the planet's atmosphere.

The 1970 mission Manturov mentioned was Venera 7, which was one of four Soviet Venera spacecraft to touch down successfully on Venus and send back pictures from the surface, according to The Planetary Society. Venera 7 and other Soviet landing missions successfully withstood temperatures of 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius) and a surface pressure over 90 times that of Earth at sea level to show a volcanic-rock surface tinged in yellow (an effect of the sulfuric-acid clouds making up the atmosphere).

The Soviet Union launched more than a dozen Venera missions over the course of 22 years. Venera 1 and Venera 2, which launched in February 1961 and November 1965, respectively, were designed to fly by Venus but didn't send back the data needed. Venera 3 entered the atmosphere as planned in March 1966 but fell silent.

The next three in the series, Veneras 4 to 6, successfully entered the atmosphere and sent back data to prepare for the first landing attempt, by Venera 7, which launched in August 1970. The Soviet Union then sent nine more missions to Venus as landers and orbiters, concluding with the successful Venera 16 in 1983.

NASA, the European Space Agency and Japan have between them sent several orbiting missions to Venus in the last few decades, and Russia isn't the only nation looking to make a Venus return.

Both ESA and NASA have missions in development; NASA's VERITAS and DAVINCI projects just survived cancellation threats in the U.S. budget for 2026. India is planning to send its own Venus mission aloft for the first time in 2028 or so, while Rocket Lab and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology want to launch the private Venus Life Finder spacecraft out there as soon as this year.

Look to the western horizon at sunset on Feb. 20 to witness an incredible sight, as three planets shine below the slender crescent of the waxing moon, with Jupiter glowing high overhead in the winter sky.

The upturned sickle-shape of the 18%-lit moon will appear 40 degrees above the horizon as the sun sets, with a string of bright "evening stars" representing Venus, Mercury and Saturn arrayed beneath, fighting for attention in the glow of the setting sun.

Saturn will be positioned 15 degrees directly below the crescent moon, with Mercury less than 10 degrees— roughly the width of your clenched fist held at arm's length — to its lower right. Mercury is currently in prime viewing position, having just passed its point of greatest eastern elongation on Feb. 19, when it was at its furthest from the sun in Earth's sky in its current evening apparition.

Find a spot with a clear view to the west for a chance to see Venus shining directly below Mercury, less than 10 degrees above the horizon at sunset. Neptune will also be present less than 1 degree — approximately the width of your little finger — to the right of Saturn, though it'll be too dim to spot with the naked eye.

Neptune is so distant that the blue spec of its disk can only be seen with the aid of an 8-inch telescope, but utmost care must be taken to ensure that the sun is well below the horizon before pointing any telescopic equipment in its direction.

Uranus, meanwhile, will be five degrees below the Pleiades on Feb. 20 and while technically just bright enough to spot with the naked eye from a dark sky location, the planet will also benefit from the magnifying power of a telescope to spot its tiny aqua disk.

Jupiter dominates the sky this time of year and can be found high in the east at sunset, glowing with the bright stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini. A 6-inch telescope will reveal details in the cloud bands lining its surface, along with its four largest moons, Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto.

The lunar crescent will also make for a fascinating telescopic target, just three days out from its new moon phase on Feb. 17. Look out for the dark forms of Mare Crisium and Mare Fecunditatis darkening the sunlit wedge of Earth's satellite, which formed when ancient lava flows flooded networks of impact craters before hardening many millions of years ago.

Next, sweep your telescope across the line separating night from day on the lunar surface — known as the terminator — to spot a myriad of shadowed impact craters scarring the lunar surface.

Want to explore the planets of the solar system for yourself? Then be sure to read our roundup of the best telescopes available in 2026. If you're into photography you'll want to peruse our picks of the best cameras and lenses for capturing the night sky.

Editor's Note: If you would like to share your planetary astrophotography with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Scientists analyzing decades-old data from NASA's Magellan mission say they have identified what appears to be a vast underground tunnel carved by volcanic activity on Venus.

If confirmed, the structure would mark only the second time a lava tube has been reported on Venus, adding to similar discoveries on the moon and Mars.

The finding also contributes to a growing body of evidence challenging the long-held view of Venus as a geologically dead world.

"Our knowledge of Venus is still limited, and until now we have never had the opportunity to directly observe processes occurring beneath the surface of Earth's twin planet," study co-author Lorenzo Bruzzone of the University of Trento in Italy said in a statement.

"The identification of a volcanic cavity is therefore of particular importance, as it allows us to validate theories that for many years have only hypothesized their existence," he added.

Venus is perpetually shrouded in dense clouds that block direct views of its surface, forcing scientists to rely on radar imagery to study the planet's geology. Between 1990 and 1992, NASA's Magellan orbiter mapped much of Venus' surface using a radar system specifically designed for that purpose, producing a vast archive of images that researchers continue to analyze.

Magellan's radar mapped Venus by transmitting radio waves toward the planet's surface and measuring how long the signals took to bounce back, allowing scientists to construct detailed surface maps. Those maps revealed long chains of pits, or collapsed areas on the surface. Some stretched tens to thousands of miles, which hinted at the presence of underground lava tubes across the Venusian surface, the study notes.

In the new study, Bruzzone and his team focused on localized surface collapses that occur when sections of rock give way, creating skylight-like openings that can expose underground voids. One such feature, located on the western flank of Nyx Mons — one of the 1,600 major volcanoes and nearly a million smaller ones that dominate the surface of Venus — produced a distinctive radar pattern closely matching signatures known to arise from collapsed lava tube roofs, the study notes.

Analysis of the surrounding terrain suggests the conduit could extend for a few dozen kilometers underground, although only part of the structure can currently be confirmed, Bruzzone said in the statement.

Confirming its full size, shape and stability will require new observations, he added.

That opportunity may come soon. A fleet of upcoming missions to Venus are expected to carry more advanced radar instruments capable of capturing higher-resolution images. For instance, studying subsurface cavities is a primary goal of an instrument called the Subsurface Radar Sounder, or SRS, planned for the EnVision mission being developed by the European Space Agency, which can penetrate the planet's surface to depths of several hundred meters.

The instrument is capable of "probing Venus's subsurface to depths of several hundred meters and potentially detecting conduits even in the absence of surface openings," Bruzzone said in the statement.

"Our discovery therefore represents only the beginning of a long and fascinating research activity."

This research is detailed in a paper published Feb. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.

The two planets that are in prime position for evening visibility this month are, ironically, the two planets on opposite ends of the spectrum concerning size. The solar system's biggest planet, Jupiter, is in excellent position for observation this month of February, high in the east-southeast sky at nightfall and soaring high into the sky during the mid-to-late evening hours. Meanwhile, the smallest planet — Mercury — will enjoy its finest evening apparition, readily available to those who seek it out about three-quarters of an hour after sunset, low in the west-southwest sky, for a three-week interval beginning on Feb. 6.

There are two other planets in the evening sky: Saturn is also in the west-southwest sky, but getting progressively lower with each passing day. The combination of low altitude and increasingly bright twilight will make it rather difficult to sight during the final week of the month. If only Saturn were a bit brighter, it would be easier to see. Which is why dazzling Venus, in the same general vicinity as Mercury and Saturn, will slowly emerge into prominence during the last half of February and on into March.

The only planet completely out of the viewing loop is Mars, which is much too close to the glare of the sun to be seen all month long.

In our schedule, remember that when measuring the angular separation between two celestial objects, your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10-degrees. Here, we present a schedule below which provides some of the best planet viewing times, as well as directing you to where to look to see them.

Mercury

Mercury, moving from superior conjunction, begins a fine apparition on the evening of Feb. 6, low in the west-southwest for skywatchers at mid-northern latitudes. During the first part of February, it comes into view higher in the fading dusk each evening. Currently, magnitude -1.1 (among the stars, only Sirius is brighter), and 12 degrees east of the sun, the planet will set an hour after sundown. On the evening of Feb. 18, about 45 minutes after sunset, look low toward the west-southwest horizon for a hairline-thin waxing crescent moon, just 2 percent illuminated by the sun. Sitting less than one degree above it will be Mercury. The pair is even closer together as seen from the Midwest and still closer together as seen from the western U.S.

The view through binoculars should be stunning. As a bonus, for parts of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida, the moon will appear to pass directly in front of Mercury. On the following evening, Mercury attains its greatest elongation, only 18.1 degrees from the sun. So small an angle for an eastern elongation will not be matched until 2039. And yet around this time Mercury will be in the sky throughout evening twilight, the only such occasion in 2026. At this time, the speedy little planet shines at magnitude -0.4, and telescopes show its tiny disk exactly half lit — which isn't always the case at most of Mercury's greatest elongations. In the following week, Mercury fades by nearly a factor of five and soon sinks out of view. Inferior conjunction occurs on March 7.

Venus

Venus was at superior conjunction with the sun on Jan. 6; farthest from Earth on Jan. 8; and at aphelion — farthest from the sun in space — on Jan. 22. As February begins, Venus will be very challenging to glimpse even with optical aid, for it will be less than 4 degrees high at sunset and will set less than a half hour after the sun.

By Feb. 15, Venus may be evident to the eye without any optical aid. About 15 minutes after sunset, search very low near the west-southwest horizon. If you still can't find it, scan with binoculars, then once found, you should be able to see it with your unaided eyes shining radiantly through the bright evening twilight. On the other hand, by month's end, this brilliant -3.9-magnitude planet appears about 10 degrees high at sunset and should be reasonably easy to find before it sets about an hour after sundown.

Mars

Mars during February lies only 6 to 12 degrees west of the sun and, as such, is hopelessly lost in the solar glare.

Jupiter

Jupiter was at opposition on Jan. 10. So, February finds it already well up in the east as the sky darkens. It shines in Gemini, dimming a bit this month from magnitude -2.6 to -2.4 as it slowly retrogrades (moves westward relative to the background stars). The big planet is high for most of the night as seen from mid-northern latitudes; it's highest around 10:20 p.m. as February begins and 8:30 p.m. as the month ends. And although its apparent diameter shrinks slightly by about 6% during this month, Jupiter always appears large enough through a medium-sized telescope to see a lot of detail in its clouds if the air is sufficiently steady. As darkness falls on Feb. 26, look high in the eastern sky for the waxing gibbous moon and hovering about a half-dozen degrees below it will be "Big Jupe."

Saturn

Saturn is losing altitude rapidly with each passing night. At the beginning of the month, it's visible low in the west-southwest sky as darkness descends. Now Saturn's lower position will make locating it trickier, so tonight, use the moon as your benchmark. In telescopes, the still-narrow rings will be slowly opening like some late-winter flower, but by month's end, it will be difficult to get an image of them unruffled by Earth's quavering atmosphere. The crescent moon, which on Feb. 19 will have widened to 7% illuminated after its close encounter with Mercury on the previous evening, will sit about 4 degrees to the right of first-magnitude Saturn.

Venus could experience a dramatic meteor shower this summer, the result of the breaking apart of a nearby asteroid that has left a trail of dust in its wake.

The meteor shower is predicted to next take place on July 5, but observing it from Earth is going to be difficult. Only superbright fireballs, with a magnitude of around minus 12 to minus 15 — roughly the same brightness in our sky as the moon — will be visible from our planet.

The origin of this proposed meteor shower is the result of a detective story involving two asteroids curiously sharing the same orbit, more or less. In 2021, a near-Earth asteroid was discovered on an orbit that brings it within 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) of Venus. Then, in April 2025, a second asteroid was found on almost exactly the same orbit.

Both asteroids, named 2021 PH27 and 2025 GN1, have the same spectral class (type X), meaning that they look the same when we measure their spectra. Also, their orbits are entirely inside that of Earth, meaning that they never intersect our planet's path and are not an impact risk. Asteroids on such orbits belong to what scientists refer to as the Atira group, and they are relatively rare.

Incidentally, the pair also have the fastest orbits ever measured for an asteroid in the solar system, taking just 115 days to complete one circuit around the sun.

The discovery of two asteroids that look the same while sharing almost the same orbit was too much of a coincidence for a team of astronomers led by Albino Carbognani of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). So they set about modeling the orbit of the asteroids going 100,000 years back into the past, to see if they could figure out the space rocks' origin.

The researchers suspected that the two asteroids were once a single asteroid that broke apart, but the simulations of their orbits revealed that at no point had they had come close enough to Earth, Venus or the sun to have been broken apart by gravitational tidal forces. The hypothesis seemed like a dead end.

Carbognani's team wasn't stumped for long, however. They noticed that the orbit of the two asteroids did change over the course of 100,000 years. At one point, it got as close to the sun — the point that astronomers refer to as perihelion — as 15 million kilometers (9 million miles).

That's about four times closer to the sun than Mercury orbits, on average.

Suppose, then, that the two asteroids were once a single body. So close to the sun, repeated heating would cause the surface of the parent asteroid to crack, weakening its interior rigidity, especially if the rock were little more than a loosely held together rubble pile.

The parent asteroid would have been rotating while it was heating up near perihelion. It absorbs heat on one side and, as it spins, it radiates excess heat away in another direction. The emission of this thermal radiation acts as a weak thrust that prompts the rotation of the asteroid to speed up — a phenomenon known as the YORP effect (in honor of Yarkovsk, O'Keefe, Radzievskii and Paddack, four scientists who were key to its discovery).

Carbognani's team suggests that, coupled with fractures on the surface weakening the asteroid's structure, the YORP effect was able to spin the parent asteroid fast enough that it broke apart into two pieces.

Their simulations suggest this could have happened between 17,000 and 21,000 years ago, which was the last time the orbit got as close as 15 million kilometers to the sun. If that's correct, then not enough time has passed for solar radiation to have cleared out all the dust sprayed into space by the asteroid breaking up.

"Considering that the orbits pass very close to Venus, it's natural to wonder whether very small fragments, on the order of a millimeter, generated by the fragmentation of the original body, could still be in orbit around the sun," said Carbognani in a statement. "Our simulations confirm that this is indeed possible."

The simulations show that Venus will next intercept the dust stream, which would have broadened out wide enough to get in the way of Venus, in July of this year. If this is correct, we can expect a meteor shower over Venus at that time.

While the vast majority of meteor showers on Earth are produced by dust left behind by the tails of comets, Carbognani draws a comparison with December's Geminid meteor shower.

"A well known case is that of the Geminids, generated by the asteroid Phaethon, and our results suggest a similar phenomenon could also occur on Venus," he said.

Seeing Venus' equivalent of the Geminids from Earth is going to be tough, however.

"To increase the probability of detection, the ideal option would be direct observation from Venus' orbit via a spacecraft," said Carbognani. Alas, there are currently no space missions operational at Venus, but the meteor shower could be observed in the future by Europe's EnVision, scheduled to launch for Venus in 2031 or 2032, or by NASA's DAVINCI and VERITAS missions, should they go ahead in the next decade.

The findings were reported on Jan. 17 in the journal Icarus.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is still in the dark about NASA's participation in its Venus exploration mission Envision despite the project's tight deadline, ESA representatives said in a recent media briefing.

Envision, which began construction in 2025, will map the atmosphere and geology of Earth's closest neighbor, the fiery Venus. The spacecraft will rely on a NASA-made instrument called VenSar — a novel synthetic aperture radar — to map the planet's surface in three dimensions and with a resolution of up to 3 feet (10 meters).

Funding for the instrument, currently being built by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is, however, uncertain. The Trump administration included VenSar in the sweeping cuts to NASA's science funding, which are part of the president's 2026 budget proposal. Although the U.S. Congress is taking steps to restore the funding, insiders told Space.com that ESA shouldn't wait too long and might be better served to cut its ties with NASA and build the instrument in Europe if it wants to avoid years of delays.

Envision must lift off for its 15-month journey to Venus in 2033 at the latest, or the distance between the two planets will be such that the trip would be unfeasible, ESA's Director of Science Carol Mundel said at the media briefing, which was held on Jan. 8. Mundel said that missing the 2033 deadline would mean having to wait for at least three years to launch during the next planetary alignment.

"We are in constant contact with NASA on Envision," Mundel said in the online briefing. "We remain in normal collaboration with NASA, but we also appreciate that NASA do continue to have some financial challenges."

Technology exists in Europe to develop VenSar domestically. In fact, the instrument was initially supposed to be built by Airbus in the United Kingdom. But sources say that whoever would be chosen to replace the instrument needs to begin moving fast to make the deadline.

"We continue to discuss with our member states how we can continue to deliver this mission," Mundel said. "We are very well aware of those deadlines."

Mundel added that NASA JPL teams continue "business as usual" with their work on VenSar and have recently passed the preliminary design review, a key early-stage milestone before production begins.

Overall, 19 ESA missions will face funding shortfalls if the Trump administration gets its way. Many of those collaborations, however, are expected to be rescued by Congress, including the gravity-wave detector LISA (the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), a planned constellation of three satellites orbiting in a triangular formation 2.5 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) apart.

On Jan. 6, the U.S. Congress published its budget proposal, which would restore most of the funding cut by Trump and provide NASA with $7.25 billion for science in 2026. The overall NASA budget for 2026 would be $24.4 billion in 2026, only about one billion less than the 2025 spending. (Trump's budget request allocated just $18.8 billion to the agency.)

The confirmation of Jared Isaacman as NASA's next administrator, however, raised concerns among some experts due to Isaacman's known preference for exploration and commercial space technology.

During the media briefing, ESA Director General Joseph Aschbacher said he had not yet met with Isaacman to discuss priorities.

ESA is expecting a busy year overall, Aschbacher said during the briefing, with 65 new satellites built with ESA's participation to be launched. In addition, the BepiColombo spacecraft, launched in 2018, is set to arrive at Mercury, its destination, in December. The probe will commence scientific exploration of the least understood planet of the inner solar system in early 2027.

The delayed HERA mission, launched in October 2024, is also going to meet its study object this year — the double asteroid Didymos/Dimorphos. The smaller of the two space rocks, Dimorphos, was the target of NASA's DART asteroid deflection experiment in 2022. HERA will enable scientists to study the effects of DART's impact in great detail.

In addition to the ongoing uncertainties around NASA's future direction, ESA has some choices to make in its own Human and Robotic Exploration program due to the decisions of its member states, which were made at the agency's latest high-level council. Although the summit, held in Bremen, Germany, in November of last year, passed a record-breaking budget of 22.1 billion Euros ($25.63 billion) for the next three years (an increase of 5 billion Euros, $5.8 billion, compared to ESA's 2022-2025 budget), the member states assigned much less money to human and robotic exploration than the agency had hoped for.

"Based on the level of subscriptions we received in Bremen, we will have to set a number of priorities in [the exploration] program for the years 2026 to 2028," Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA's director for human and robotic exploration, said at the Jan. 8 briefing. "By the end of February, we will have the main priorities set."

Most of ESA's space exploration programs are conducted in cooperation with NASA, including missions to the International Space Station and exploration of the moon and Mars. The NASA budget chaos might possibly impact Europe's delayed ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover. The Mars Sample Return mission, for which ESA was developing a return vehicle, is not expected to go ahead, and the agency is looking to repurpose the technology for an entirely new mission.

Skywatchers in the Southern Hemisphere were in for a rare treat as two planets formed a recent conjunction in the night sky. Mars (seen in the upper track) and Venus (lower track) appear to "cross" the open star cluster Messier 44 — better known as Praesepe or the Beehive Cluster— creating two bright, dotted paths against a dense swarm of starlight in this composite time-lapse photo. The image combines each planet's nightly positions during separate 2025 apparitions, assembled by astrophotographer Petr Horálek, a NOIRLab Audiovisual Ambassador.

This composite image was weeks in the making, as Horálek’s two "crossings" happened months apart. Mars traced its path through the cluster from late April to early May 2025. Venus followed with a brief morning-twilight passage from late August to early September 2025, appearing low in early dawn light.

What is it?

The Beehive is a favorite skywatching target because it's both nearby and rich: NASA describes M44 as an open cluster of around 1,000 stars at roughly 600 light-years away, in the constellation Cancer. In this image, the cluster is highlighted as one of the nearest and most star-packed open clusters visible from Earth, perfect for a "foreground vs. background" illusion when a bright planet happens to pass through the same line of sight.

Where is it?

These various time-lapse images were taken from sites in Chile, Bolivia, and the Czech Republic.

Why is it amazing?

People have long known that planets move relative to the stars — indeed, the word "planet" comes from the Greek term for "wanderer" — but it’s hard to internalize until you see a track like this: Night after night, the planets are somewhere new. The dotted paths turn an abstract fact — Earth's viewpoint changing as planets move along their orbits — into something immediate and visual.

The Beehive cluster also sits close enough to the ecliptic (the plane of the solar system as projected on the sky) that planets can appear to pass through it. Seeing both Mars and Venus do so in the same year is a vivid reminder that the planets share a common orbital neighborhood, and that some deep-sky landmarks are perfectly placed for these striking conjunctions.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about skywatching tips and star clusters.

Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, currently shines as a brilliant silvery "star" in Gemini the Twins, low in the east-northeast sky as dusk slowly fades. It forms an eye-catching scalene triangle configuration with the "Twin Stars" Pollux and Castor; you really can't miss it.

And at 4 a.m. EST (0900 GMT) on Saturday (Jan. 10), Jupiter will arrive at that point in the sky directly opposite to the sun, called "opposition." If all the planets' paths around the sun were true circles, this would also coincide with Earth's closest approach to Jupiter, 393.3 million miles (632.9 million kilometer). That, however, occurs 25 hours earlier, at 3 a.m. EST (0800 GMT) on Friday (Jan. 9).

Opposition occurs when Earth, moving faster in its orbit than Jupiter, overtakes the giant planet. In the four months centered on each opposition, Jupiter appears to swirl backward in a loop against the background stars. After opposition, we will leave Jupiter behind. Jupiter is also currently moving away from the sun on its own elliptical path, while, less than a week ago, Earth passed its closest point to the sun (perihelion).

Jupiter will reach its farthest point from the sun — its aphelion point, which takes it 507 million miles (815.7 million km) from our star — on Dec. 28, 2028.

'Big Jupe' almost became a star

Jupiter constantly is the most interesting object in the solar system after the moon and the sun and has always held a special place in the hearts of telescope viewers. Jupiter provides telescope users with a feast of features: a restless atmosphere and a retinue of bright satellites.

This giant planet — which has nearly 2.5 times more mass than all of the other planets put together — takes nearly 12 Earth years to go once around the sun. Thus, it spends roughly a year within each of the 12 zodiacal constellations, since the constellations are of unequal width.

With an equatorial diameter of 88,846 miles (142,984 km), Jupiter is the largest planet: a colossal ball of hydrogen and helium without a solid surface. Scientists are currently uncertain about the exact nature of Jupiter's core, but modern data suggests it is not the solid, compact rocky ball once imagined. Recent findings from NASA's Juno mission and updated scientific models suggest that, instead of a sharp boundary between a solid core and the rest of the planet, Jupiter likely has a "dilute" core. This means that heavy elements like rock and metal are dissolved and encased in a thick mantle of metallic hydrogen enveloped in a massive atmospheric cloak of multi-colored clouds of ammonium hydrosulphide.

And, in a strange sense, Jupiter might even be referred to as a stillborn star, for it has the makings (mostly hydrogen) if not the mass of a stellar body. Its relative smallness, however, prevents the initiation of the nuclear processes that could have turned it into a full-fledged star. Had Jupiter been born a bit bigger, we would have the distinction of living within a binary star system.

Cloud bands and satellites

Binoculars show Jupiter as a tiny disk, while a medium-size telescope reveals numerous dark belts, light zones and a wealth of festoons, garlands, ovals and other features extending here and there. Jupiter's rotation is the fastest of all the solar system's planets. It completes a rotation on its axis in slightly less than 10 hours, which creates an equatorial bulge easily perceived through most telescopes. And January offers nearly optimum views of its intricate cloud features; it's even possible at mid-northern latitudes to observe every longitude of the planet during the long night.

Besides its prominent cloud belts, Jupiter's greatest telescopic treasure are its four Galilean moons that run a merry race with each other around the planet, changing their respective positions from hour to hour and night to night. The smallest of telescopes – even steadily held 7-power binoculars – will reveal these four bright satellites of Jupiter as tiny stars nearly in line and changing their places in the line as they revolve around the planet in orbits nearly edgewise to us. Typically, at least two or three are visible at any given moment.

On Saturday (Jan. 10), for example, we will see three satellites on one side of Jupiter (going outward from the planet: Ganymede, Io and Europa), while the fourth (Callisto) remains all by itself on Jupiter's opposite side.

Coming attractions

Jupiter will appear to climb higher in the evening sky in the weeks to come. Currently, the giant planet is ready for telescopic observation by 7 p.m., when it will stand one-third of the way up from the eastern horizon to that point directly overhead (called the zenith). It reaches its highest position in the south around midnight and is heading toward its setting in the west during dawn. After the glory of its opposition on the midnight meridian, Jupiter will appear a bit higher in the east each evening and will engage its stellar neighbors, Pollux and Castor in a sort of celestial pas de trois in the coming weeks.

On the evening of Feb. 27, the scalene triangle will have changed into a narrow isosceles, and nearly aligned with Pollux and Castor will be a waxing gibbous moon. But the real show occurs in late May and early June, when a fascinating dance of three planets and the moon will provide evening enchantment. On the evening of May 20, a crescent moon will be positioned well to the upper left of Jupiter. During the final week of May, one hour after sunset, you can watch how Venus climbs to meet Jupiter. On June 9, they'll call attention to themselves low in the west-northwest sky. Finally, on June 16, a slender crescent moon will appear to the right of Jupiter, and below the moon will sit yet another planet, Mercury.

The heavenly ballet continuously being performed by these "wandering stars" has played a crucial role in the celestial lore of all people. It is not surprising that they were regarded as deities. The five naked-eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) have been known since antiquity, and it is also interesting that the members of this quintet have all been examined closely by space probes. Of course, before the advent of the telescope, virtually all peoples regarded planets as a special category of star.

Over the following month, Jupiter sinks into the sun's glare. Emerging into the morning sky of August, he will progress into the constellation of Cancer the Crab, and on Sept. 24 he will cross over into the western boundary of Leo the Lion, where he will remain for the balance of the year. A spectacular eclipse (occultation) of Jupiter will await early risers across much of North America on Oct. 6, and a brightening Mars will closely pass north of Jupiter on Nov. 16. On Dec. 13, Jupiter will begin to swirl backward into the next loop that will climax in the opposition of Feb. 10, 2027.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope and other publications.

Venus will align with the sun and Earth to undergo a superior solar conjunction later today (Jan. 6), but what does that mean and, more pressingly, will you be able to see it happen? Read on to find out more.

The planets of the solar system orbit the sun in a complex and ever-shifting ballet, which can see them appear as glorious star-like objects to the naked eye for months on end or render them entirely lost from view as they slip into the glare of our parent star.

Venus — which is often referred to as Earth's twin thanks to its comparable size and rocky composition — treads a tighter orbit around our parent star than our own Blue Marble. As a result, it never strays far from the horizon, while taking it in turns to appear in the evening and morning sky — periods which astronomers refer to as "apparitions."

At 12:10 p.m. EST (17:10 GMT) on Jan. 6, Venus' orbit will see it line up behind the sun from the perspective of Earth in an event known as a superior solar conjunction, marking its transition from a morning object to an evening object, according to In-the-sky. This is also the time when Venus reaches apogee, its most distant point from Earth in its orbit.

Sadly, the glare of the sun makes it impossible to see Venus in the weeks surrounding either a superior solar conjunction or an inferior solar conjunction, when the rocky world passes between Earth and the sun. However, Venus is expected to emerge back into view in February per EarthSky and will reach its highest altitude in the morning sky on June 5.

Want to be ready to see the moon-like phases of Venus when it rises higher in the evening sky over the coming months?? Then be sure to check out our roundups of the best telescopes for viewing solar system planets that are available in 2026.

If you're new to the night sky, you may also want to see our picks of the best smartphone astronomy apps, which use augmented reality technology to help pinpoint the locations of everything from planets and nebulas to distant galaxies and stars.

Want to know when each planet will be at its best or when you can catch eye-catching planetary pairings in 2026?

This guide breaks down the major planetary events of the year, from conjunctions to oppositions to close planet-star encounters.

Related: Night sky tonight live blog

Mercury

Mercury, the smallest of the planets visible to the naked eye, appears as an evening star in the western sky, setting about an hour after the sun. As a morning star, it rises about an hour before the sun in the eastern sky. To view the planet, a clear, unobstructed view of the horizon is essential. Mercury usually appears as a bright "star" with a yellowish or ochre tint.

Visibility windows in 2026

• Evenings: Feb. 5–26; June 1–22; Sept. 28–Oct. 19
• Mornings: March 27– April 17; July 26– Aug. 16; Nov. 13– Dec. 4

When will it be at its best?

• Evening: Feb. 5–26
• Morning: Nov. 13– Dec. 4

On the evening of Feb. 18, about 30 minutes after sunset, Mercury will sit just 1 degree above a slender waxing crescent moon low in the west-southwest.

Venus

Venus, with its nearly circular orbit and a diameter only 400 miles (640 kilometers) smaller than Earth's, shines with a brilliant, steady silvery light.

Visibility windows in 2026

• Evenings: March 8– Oct. 14
• Mornings: Nov. 3– Dec. 31

When will it be at its best?

Venus reaches greatest brilliancy in the evening sky on Sept. 19 and in the morning sky on Nov. 29. In late September through mid-October, and again through most of November, Venus will show a striking crescent phase in telescopes and steady binoculars.

Notable conjunctions:

• March 8: Venus passes 1 degree to the upper right of Saturn.
• June 9: Venus passes 1.6 degrees to the upper right of Jupiter — a brilliant sight in the west-northwest 45 minutes after sunset.
• Nov. 7 (morning): Shortly before sunrise, look low to the east-southeast for Venus, a crescent moon, and the star Spica, all fitting within 2.5 degrees.

Mars

Mars, long associated with Ares, the Greek god of war, shines like a star with a yellowish-orange hue and can vary considerably in brightness.

Visibility in 2026

• Mornings: March 18- Dec. 31

When will it be at its best?

This is an "off" year for Mars. The planet begins 2026 lost in the sun's glare and reaches solar conjunction on Jan. 9, sitting on the far side of the solar system about 223 million miles from Earth.

Mars begins to reappear in the third week of March, rising before sunrise among the faint stars of Aquarius. It moves into Taurus for the first half of summer, shining only around magnitude +1.3.

Sky highlights:

• Sept. 25: Castor and Pollux point directly toward Mars.
• Oct. 11: Mars passes through the Beehive Cluster in Cancer — an attractive sight in binoculars.
• Nov. 26: Mars passes 1.7 degrees above Regulus in Leo, creating a dramatic color contrast.
• By late December, Mars brightens to magnitude –0.1 and will rival Arcturus in both color and brightness.
• Feb. 19, 2027: Mars reaches its next opposition, so it steadily approaches Earth late in 2026.

Notable conjunctions:

• April 20: Mars aligns closely with Saturn and Mercury.
• July 4: Mars passes just 0.1 degree south of Uranus, offering a superb guidepost for locating Uranus.
• Nov. 16: Mars passes 1.2 degrees to the upper left of Jupiter.

Jupiter

Jupiter, the giant planet with a diameter about 11 times bigger than Earth's, shines with a bright silver-white luster.

Visibility windows in 2026

• Mornings: Jan. 1–9; Aug. 19– Dec. 31
• Evenings: Jan. 10–July 7

Jupiter reaches opposition on Jan. 10 and shines brightest from Jan. 1–22 at magnitude –2.7 in Gemini. It enters Cancer on June 22 and Leo on Sept. 24, where it remains through year's end.

On June 9, Jupiter pairs with Venus in a stunning "double planet" display low in the west-northwest at dusk.

Oct. 6 lunar occultation

On the morning of Oct. 6, observers across most of North America (excluding the far West) and northern Cuba will witness a spectacular lunar occultation of Jupiter. A waning crescent moon will slide directly in front of Jupiter, hiding it for up to an hour depending on location. Jupiter disappears behind the bright limb and reemerges dramatically from the moon's dark side.

Saturn

Saturn shines as a yellowish-white "star" of moderate brightness. Its famous rings, invisible to the naked eye, turned edge-on in 2025 and were nearly impossible to see for weeks. They are now slowly opening up again.

Constellation path in 2026:

• Starts in Aquarius (to Jan. 14)
• Enters Pisces (Jan. 14– April 8)
• Moves through Cetus (April 9– June 2)
• Back into Pisces (June 3–Sept 4)
• Back into Cetus (from Sept. 5 onward)

Visibility windows in 2026

• Evenings: Jan. 1–March 8; Oct. 4–Dec. 31
• Mornings: April 12– Oct. 3

Saturn reaches opposition on Oct. 4 and is brightest Sept. 24–Oct. 9.

Notable conjunctions:

• Feb. 15: Saturn sits less than 1 degree from Neptune, though Neptune is much fainter.
• Apr. 20: Saturn aligns with Mars and Mercury.

Uranus

Uranus can be glimpsed with the naked eye under very dark skies by keen-eyed observers. At magnitude +5.6, it is easily found with binoculars; small telescopes show a tiny greenish disk.

Uranus spends all of 2026 in Taurus.

Visibility windows in 2026

• Evenings: Jan. 1–May 5; Nov. 25– Dec. 31
• Mornings: June 9–Nov. 24

Uranus reaches opposition on Nov. 25 and is brightest Oct. 24–Dec. 30.

On July 4, Uranus sits only 0.1 degree north of Mars, making Mars an ideal pointer to the seventh planet. Mars will outshine Uranus by a factor of about 158.

Neptune

Neptune remains in Pisces throughout 2026. At magnitude +7.8, it is visible only in binoculars or a telescope and appears bluish-gray.

Visibility windows in 2026

• Evenings: Jan. 1–March 6; Sept. 25–Dec. 31
• Mornings: April. 8– Sept. 24

Neptune reaches opposition on Sept. 25 and is brightest July 28–Nov. 24.

On Feb. 15, Neptune lies less than 1 degree to the upper right of Saturn, though Neptune is only about 1/525 as bright.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope and other publications.

A newly identified tectonic "regime" may rewrite our understanding of how rocky worlds evolve, scientists report in a new study.

The findings may help to explain why Earth became geologically vibrant while Venus remained stagnant and scorching, with possible implications for our understanding of what makes a planet habitable.

When researchers used advanced geodynamic simulations to map diverse planetary tectonic regimes — distinct patterns that describe how a planet's outer shell deforms and releases heat under different conditions — they discovered a missing link they've dubbed the "episodic-squishy lid."

This striking new framework offers a fresh perspective on how planets shift between active and inactive states, thus reshaping scientific assumptions about planetary evolution and habitability, the team said in a statement explaining the study.

Tectonic regimes influence a planet's geological activity, internal evolution, magnetic field, atmosphere and even its potential to support life. The episodic-squishy lid builds on the traditional divide between plate tectonics or mobile lid regimes (like modern Earth) and stagnant-lid behavior (like Mars). It describes a state in which a planet's lithosphere cycles between relatively quiet periods and sudden bursts of tectonic motion. Unlike a classic stagnant lid, this regime permits intermittent weakening driven by intrusive magmatism and regional delamination, temporarily softening the crust before it stiffens again.

This on-again, off-again behavior could be a missing link in Earth's early evolution, the researchers said. The models suggest that Earth may have passed through a squishy-lid phase that gradually primed its lithosphere for full plate tectonics as the planet cooled.

The findings also help to clarify the "memory effect" — the idea that a planet's tectonic behavior is shaped by its past — by showing that as a planet's lithosphere weakens over time, as Earth's did, the transitions between tectonic states become far more predictable.

By mapping all six tectonic regimes under different physical conditions for the first time, the team constructed a comprehensive diagram revealing likely transition pathways as a planet cools.

"Geological records suggest that tectonic activity on early Earth aligns with the characteristics of our newly identified regime," study co-author Guochun Zhao, a geologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in the statement. "As Earth gradually cooled, its lithosphere became more prone to fracturing under specific physical mechanisms, eventually leading to today's plate tectonics. This provides a key piece of the puzzle in explaining how Earth became a habitable planet."

The episodic-squishy lid may also shed light on Venus's long-standing mysteries. Although Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, it lacks clear evidence of plate tectonics, instead displaying volcanically reshaped terrain and distinctive features called coronae. The new simulations reproduce Venus-like patterns by placing the planet in an episodic or plutonic squishy-lid regime, where magmatism and mantle plumes periodically weaken the surface without generating true plates.

"Our models intimately link mantle convection with magmatic activity," study co-author Maxim Ballmer, an associate professor of geodynamics at University College London, said in the statement. "This allows us to view the long geological history of Earth and the current state of Venus within a unified theoretical framework, and it provides a crucial theoretical basis for the search for potentially habitable Earth analogs and super-Earths outside our solar system."

Because tectonics govern how water and carbon dioxide circulate through a planet's interior and atmosphere, understanding how lithospheres weaken and transition between regimes could help scientists assess which distant worlds might support stable climates, or even life, and guide decisions on observational targets for future missions.

The findings were published Nov. 24 in the journal Nature Communications.

This article was originally published at Eos. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Imagine the catastrophic winds of a category 5 hurricane. Now, imagine even faster winds of more than 100 meters per second, encircling the planet and whipping clouds across the sky, with no end in sight. This scenario would be astonishing on Earth, but it's business as usual on Venus, where the atmosphere at cloud level rotates about 60 times faster than the planet itself—a phenomenon known as superrotation. In contrast, Earth's cloud-level atmosphere rotates at about the same speed as the planet's surface.

Prior research has explored the mechanisms driving atmospheric superrotation on Venus, but the details remain murky. New evidence from Lai et al. suggests that a once-daily atmospheric tidal cycle, fueled by heat from the sun, contributes much more to the planet's extreme winds than previously thought.

Rapid atmospheric rotation often occurs on rocky planets that, like Venus, are located relatively close to their stars and rotate very slowly. On Venus, one full rotation takes 243 Earth days. Meanwhile, the atmosphere races around the planet in a mere 4 Earth days.

To better understand this superrotation, the researchers analyzed data collected between 2006 and 2022 by the European Space Agency's Venus Express satellite and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki satellite, which both studied Venus's atmosphere by detecting how it bends radio waves. The research team also simulated superrotation using a numerical model of Venus's atmosphere.

The analysis focused specifically on thermal tides—one of several atmospheric processes, alongside meridional circulation and planetary waves, whose interactions have previously been shown to sustain Venus's superrotation by transporting momentum. Thermal tides are patterns of air movement that occur when sunlight heats air on the dayside of a planet. Venusian thermal tides can be broken into two major components: diurnal tides, which follow a cyclical pattern repeating once per Venusian day, and semidiurnal tides, which have two cycles per day.

Earlier research suggested that semidiurnal tides are the main thermal tide component involved in superrotation. However, this study—which includes the first analysis of thermal tides in Venus's southern hemisphere—found that diurnal tides play a primary role in transporting momentum toward the tops of Venus's thick clouds, suggesting diurnal tides are major contributors to the rapid winds.

Though the researchers note that further clarification of the contributions of diurnal tides is needed, the work sheds new light on Venus’s extreme winds and could aid meteorological research on other slowly rotating planets.

Read the original article here.

Venus just lost its last active spacecraft, but more might be coming in a few years.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki mission orbiting Venus was declared dead last week after engineers spent more than a year trying to get in touch with the silent spacecraft. Akatsuki spent a decade orbiting the planet and was well beyond its design lifetime when its mission ended, giving unprecedented looks at the hellish atmosphere of Venus.

While this Venus mission is gone, more are on the books. But some of them are hanging by a thread, as they depend on NASA support at a time when the agency is facing unprecedented budget cuts. The Trump administration proposed a 24% reduction to the agency's fiscal 2026 budget, from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. While the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate have proposed more money for NASA, the U.S. budget is still in limbo as the government enters its second month of shutdown after the fiscal year began on Oct. 1.

Here is a list of proposed missions to Venus.

NASA's DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging)

The $500 million DAVINCI mission is slated to launch in the early 2030s as a combination orbiter and descent probe. The orbiter will look at the clouds of Venus, as well as the planet's mountains, during two flybys. The 3-foot-wide (1 meter) descent probe will fall to the surface of Venus and catalog its punishingly thick atmosphere and sulfuric acid-laden clouds along the way, as well as take some images of Venus' surface terrain.

NASA says the spacecraft together will achieve several firsts, including looking for traces of any ancient water cycle on Venus. The mission will focus on Alpha Regio, a "tessera" highland region that has only been imaged through orbital radar instruments. These types of terrain may be billions of years old, making the region one of the oldest surfaces on Venus.

DAVINCI will also be the first mission to chart the chemical composition of the lower atmosphere of Venus, between 17 miles (27.5 kilometers) and the surface, which will allow scientists to learn more about how gases and chemical compounds work on the surface — and perhaps even the subsurface — of Venus. But that's assuming the spacecraft goes forward, as it is on the list of canceled missions in the Trump administration's 2026 NASA budget.

NASA's VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy)

VERITAS will launch no earlier than 2031 to learn more about how Venus and Earth, which are roughly the same size, diverged so greatly in their planetary histories. Aims of the science include learning how the oceans and magnetic field of Venus disappeared, and how plate tectonics changed the terrain. Like DAVINCI, however, VERITAS will be canceled if Trump's 2026 NASA budget is enacted.

VERITAS, a half-billion-dollar mission, is based on the design of NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft that has been orbiting Mars since 2014. The spacecraft is supposed to orbit around the poles of Venus to allow for views of the entire planet below. Initially the orbit will be 120 hours and highly elliptical, but managers plan a second burn of the engines that will allow VERITAS to circle the planet in only 10 hours.

VERITAS will then use a technique called "aerobraking," using the drag of the upper atmosphere of Venus to lower its orbit by reducing the speed of the spacecraft. This is a lengthy procedure, expected to last several months, but will allow the spacecraft to carry less fuel to Venus and prioritize that mass instead for instrumentation. Once that is finished, VERITAS will be able to go around the planet in 1.6 hours, for a mission expected to last for 2.5 Earth years.

European Space Agency's Envision

Envision is slated to lift off no earlier than November 2031 aboard an Arianespace Ariane 6 rocket. Led by the European Space Agency (ESA), the mission will include a synthetic aperture radar from NASA as well as support from the American agency's Deep Space Network, which is a group of three large radio dishes that communicate with spacecraft across the solar system. NASA's contribution, however, is under threat following proposed cuts to its fiscal 2026 budget, ESA officials confirmed to Nature earlier this year.

The €610 million ($705 million) mission will cruise to Venus for 15 months, then aerobrake in the atmosphere for 11 months before reaching its science orbit, which will circle the planet in roughly 90 minutes. ESA says the mission will focus on the origins of habitability in the solar system, as Venus may have had a climate similar to that of Earth for billions of years before something triggered its oven-like conditions at the surface. The mission aims to spend four Earth years examining Venus from its subsurface to its upper atmosphere, including learning more about the planet's history while charting its current climate and activity.

The spacecraft will be an orbiter with several instruments: an S-band radar/microwave radiometer and altimeter that will map the surface of the planet; three optical spectrometers aiming to examine trace gases (including volcanic gases) as well as the composition of the surface; a subsurface radar sounder to examine the subsurface as far as 0.6 miles (1 km) below the surface; and a radio science experiment to look at Venus' gravity field, as well as atmospheric composition and structure.

Rocket Lab's Venus Life Finder

Billed as the first private mission to explore Venus, Rocket Lab is partnering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to launch a small spacecraft to Venus in search of the building blocks of life, organic compounds, in the cloud layers of Venus. The Venus Life Finder mission is expected to use Rocket Lab's Electron rocket and Photon spacecraft, which will orbit the planet roughly 30 miles (48 km) above the surface. It was originally slated to fly in early 2025, but after a delay the spacecraft may lift off in summer 2026.

The mission (pegged at just $10 million in media reports) includes a probe that is expected to fall into the atmosphere of Venus, taking data primarily at altitudes between 37 and 28 miles (60 to 45 kilometers). This region was chosen because there have been suggestions of phosphine there, and temperatures and pressures in this altitude range are similar to those on Earth.

During a science collection phase lasting only between three and five minutes, according to the Planetary Society, the mission's laser science instrument (an autofluorescence nephelometer) will strike cloud molecules in the atmosphere. The instrument will then examine the scattered light for more information about the size, shape and concentration of the molecules. If the molecules are organic, they may glow or autofluoresce.

Indian Space Research Organisation's Venus Orbiter Mission

India plans to send its first mission to Venus no earlier than 2028, following several missions looking to compare planets in the solar system: three Chandrayaan space missions to the moon (2008, 2019 and 2023) and the Mars Orbiter Mission to the Red Planet in 2014. The Venus Orbiter Mission, nicknamed Shukrayaan, costs $147 million (12.36 billion rupees) and has been delayed from a launch in 2023.

In background information about the mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation says that Venus is particularly interesting because of its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, high-pressure surface and active ionosphere (upper atmosphere) that's influenced by the solar wind, or constant stream of particles from the sun.

The Venus Orbiter Mission is supposed to orbit the planet to study its surface, atmosphere, and solar interactions, and will also test aerobraking in the atmosphere. Some of the science objectives of its 16 payloads include high-resolution mapping of the surface, looking at dust and "airglow" in the atmosphere, examining below the surface and looking at the X-ray spectrum of solar rays near the planet.

A pairing-off of the brightest planet and a slender crescent moon will be the chief celestial attraction in the dawn sky early on Sunday morning.

If you look low toward the eastern horizon about 60 to 75 minutes before sunrise (make sure there aren't any trees or buildings to obstruct your view) you should readily catch sight of the very narrow (4 percent illuminated) crescent moon. And situated only 4 degrees to its left will blaze Venus. Of course, what you will be seeing is merely an illusion of perspective. The moon — our nearest neighbor in space — will be situated about 247,000 miles (398,000 km) from Earth, while Venus is nearly 600 times more distant at 147 million miles (236 million km) away.

October provides our last chance to get a good view of it against a reasonably dark sky until next April. By December it will be gone. Currently, Venus remains spectacular at magnitude -3.9,making it by far the brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon. Yet, in spite of its lustrous appearance, it's disappointing through a telescope, displaying only a tiny, nearly full disk of little interest to telescopic observers. And Venus is sinking closer to the eastern horizon with each passing day, since it's heading behind the sun as seen from our Earthly vantage point.

What does it mean?

These two celestial objects, moon and Venus — the brightest of the nighttime sky — will form a widely spaced, albeit eye-catching gathering for early risers on Sunday. Most observers will likely just give them a cursory glance, but a pairing such as this may have made a far greater impression on ancient skywatchers.

Ancient humans probably took note of the fact that the planets — themselves resembling bright stars — had the freedom to wander in the heavens, while the other "fixed" stars remained rooted in their positions. This ability to move seemed to have an almost magical, god-like quality. And evidence that the planets came to be associated with the gods lies in their very names, which represent ancient deities from Roman and Greek.

Skywatchers thousands of years ago must have deduced that if the movements of the moon and planets had any significance at all, it must be to inform those who could read celestial signs of what the fates held in store. Indeed, even to this day, many newspapers carry horoscopes, catering to those who firmly believe that the changing positions of the sun, moon and planets can have a decided effect on the destinies of individuals and nations on the Earth.

But as for any chance that this moon/Venus rendezvous might have any influence on our lives in any way, forget it. No astrologer can predict from planetary alignments or any other celestial configuration when a specific event, good or bad, will occur here on Earth.

In any case, it will still be worth a look.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope and other publications.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered phosphine in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf — the same chemical that stoked controversy following claims that it had been detected on Venus and could be coming from life.

This new detection on a brown dwarf is predicted by models that simulate alien atmospheres and is a reminder that phosphine is not necessarily a biosignature. However, astronomers remain puzzled about why some objects contain phosphine and others do not, even though theory says it should be there.

The phosphine was identified in the cold atmosphere of a brown dwarf called Wolf 1130C, which exists in a triple system along with a low-mass red dwarf star and a white dwarf. The phosphine exists with an abundance of 0.1 parts per million, which matches what models of the atmosphere of gas giant planets and brown dwarfs predict. Indeed, both Jupiter and Saturn contain a similar abundance of phosphine to Wolf 1130C.

The problem has been that many brown dwarfs that are expected to show detectable abundances of phosphine do not, and scientists don't know why.

Phosphine is a phosphorus-based molecule, composed of one atom of phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms. It is also pretty unstable in atmospheric conditions, and chemical reactions can easily break phosphine molecules apart. We see phosphine in Jupiter and Saturn's clouds because it is formed deep within the hot interiors of the giant planets, and then convection currents carry the phosphine to higher altitudes faster than the rate at which it is destroyed.

This is one of the reasons why the claimed detection of phosphine on Venus is so controversial.

It was in 2020 that a team led by Jane Greaves of the University of Cardiff in Wales detected phosphine in Venus' atmosphere using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. On Earth, phosphine occurs naturally as a product of biological processes, and Greaves' team strongly pushed the biological angle to explain their discovery, leading to speculation that there could be microbes living in Venus' toxic clouds.

However, a large section of the astronomical community differed with the team's findings, arguing that there were flaws in the analysis, and other groups have struggled to replicate the findings. In spite of this, Greaves' team has doubled down on their conclusions, and the presence of phosphine on Venus remains fiercely debated and controversial.

Part of scientists' disagreement with the discovery is that they find it hard to see how the phosphine could survive in Venus' atmosphere.

Nevertheless, phosphine is still considered a potential biosignature by astrobiologists in their search for alien life.

However, its existence in the clouds of Jupiter and Saturn, and now on Wolf 1130C, is a reminder that non-biological chemical processes can also produce phosphine. The question is why Jupiter, Saturn and Wolf 1130C have detectable levels of phosphine while other brown dwarfs that have been studied by JWST do not, or at least are so depleted in it that the molecule is not detectable.

There are several possible explanations. One is unique to the Wolf 1130 system. Before it evolved into a white dwarf, Wolf 1130B was a large star with a mass between six and eight times that of our sun. Such stars aren't quite massive enough to go supernova, so they end their lives much in the same way as our sun will — by expanding to become a red giant and then puffing off their outer layers to form a planetary nebula, while leaving behind their inert core as a white dwarf the size of Earth which, in the case of Wolf 1130B, packs in 1.24 solar masses.

Stars in the six-to-eight solar mass range can produce significant amounts of phosphorus in the latter stages of their life, which they can then belch out into space as the red giant shrugs off its outer layers. If this phosphorus-rich material was spewed all over Wolf 1130C, then it would explain where the phosphorus to form phosphine came from.

It's a nice theory, but unfortunately it doesn't pass muster. The white dwarf in the Wolf 1130 system forms a close binary with the low-mass star, Wolf 1130A, while the brown dwarf orbits the pair of them from a distance. A and B are so close that they are tidally locked to each other, meaning they show each other the same face constantly. Their relationship is even more involved than that — the gravitational pull of the white dwarf is actually stretching Wolf 1130A into an egg shape toward it.

When the star that formed the white dwarf died, the outer layers of the red giant would have engulfed Wolf 1130A. If the death of the star that became the white dwarf had deposited phosphorus onto the brown dwarf, then we'd also expect to see an over-abundance of phosphorus on Wolf 1130A, but we do not.

Another possibility is that the presence of phosphine is somehow related to the intrinsic chemical composition of the brown dwarf. Some models predict that atmospheres that contain very few elements heavier than helium have a preponderance for more phosphine. Indeed, 1130C does appear to have a very low abundance of these heavier elements, which astronomers refer to collectively as "metals." Similarly, Jupiter and Saturn also have low "metallicities."

The exact reason why a lack of heavy elements promotes phosphine is multifaceted: Not only does it help create the conditions in which phosphine can form and survive longer than it normally would, but the relative lack of other molecules present in the atmosphere means that there is less to interfere with the phosphine signal in the brown dwarf's spectrum, causing it to stand out more.

The problem is that other brown dwarfs observed by JWST also have low metallicities, but they don't show the expected amounts of phosphine.

These ambiguities prompt the authors of the new research, led by Adam Burgasser of the University of California, San Diego, to question how useful a biosignature phosphine is when we cannot even say for sure how it forms on distant planets and brown dwarfs.

"The inability of models to consistently explain all these sources indicates an incomplete understanding of phosphorus chemistry in low-temperature atmospheres," the authors said. "We therefore caution against the use of phosphine as a biosignature until these discrepancies are resolved."

If nothing else, the new study reminds us that, even if the detection of phosphine on Venus turns out to be real, its origin could very well be abiotic rather than biologically related. It's not time to get excited about life on any of these worlds just yet.

The findings were published on Oct. 2 in the journal Science.

A hidden population of asteroids sharing Venus' orbit could threaten Earth in a few thousand years, and we might not even see them coming without better telescopes.

These so-called Venus co-orbital asteroids are currently undetected because of their alignment in the sky but could one day drift into Earth’s path, at least according to simulations combining analytical models and long-term orbital integration.

"Our study shows that there’s a population of potentially dangerous asteroids that we can’t detect with current telescopes," Valerio Carruba, first author and professor at São Paulo State University (UNESP), said in a statement.

Unlike asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, these objects orbit the sun near Venus in a one-to-one resonance, completing one solar circuit in the same time as Venus. As such, these asteroids are only in the line-of-sight of a telescope when the telescope is pointed sunward, making it very difficult to see anything else but the bright yellow ball in the sky.

However, though 20 known Venus co-orbitals exist, nearly all of them exhibit eccentricities greater than 0.38, placing them partly outside the sunward observational blind spots, making them easier to detect during dawn and dusk observation windows. Models suggest a far larger cohort of low-eccentricity bodies orbit too tightly around the sun to be detected by ground telescopes — except under very specific conditions.

The newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory, for example, may only catch the brightest of these asteroids if they happen to stray more than 20 degrees above the horizon. The unstable nature of these objects' orbits, however, means there's no way to predict when that will happen, and Rubin can't just stare at the sun all year and wait for them to show up.

As such, the researchers propose using space-based instruments like NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor to better monitor the region to identify and track these co-orbitals.

This sounds like Venus' problem. Why are we concerned?

Researchers say their simulations show that asteroids up to 328 yards (300 meters) wide could be among these hidden co-orbitals, and that the push and pull of gravity in the region makes the eccentricities of these orbits unstable.

One orbit could see an asteroid keeping fairly close to Venus, while later orbits could put it dangerously close to Earth's, possibly every few thousand years or so. "During these transition phases, the asteroids can reach extremely small distances from Earth’s orbit, potentially crossing it," Carruba says.

If one of these particular asteroids ever gets pushed into Earth's path, an impact event could carve a crater 1.9 to 2.8 miles (3 to 4.5 kilometers) across and unleash energy on the order of hundreds of megatons.

"An impact in a densely populated area would cause large-scale devastation," Carruba says, adding "Planetary defense needs to consider not only what we can see, but also what we can’t yet see."

The study is described in a paper published in the July edition of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics

The mystery behind Venus' giant, crown-shaped geological features, known as coronae, may finally have an explanation: A "glass ceiling" in Venus' mantle is trapping heat and driving slow, shifting currents that might lead to the formation of the crown-like surface features, scientists propose in a new study.

"On Venus, there is a pattern that is telling us something," Madeleine Kerr, a doctoral candidate at the University of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the study's lead author, said in a statement. "We think what we found is the key to unlocking the mystery of the origin of these coronae."

Venus and Earth are considered "twin" planets because they have roughly the same size, bulk density and distance from the sun. However, the planets' surfaces indicate that they diverged on their evolutionary paths, leading to two substantially different worlds. One such difference is these coronae, which are unique to Venus.

Related: Earth's 'evil twin' Venus may have mirrored our planet more than expected

Scientists have mapped more than 700 coronae across Venus' surface, and they span a wide range of sizes and features. Yet their origin is still a puzzle, given that Venus is covered in a single, continuous crust — unlike Earth, which has shifting tectonic plates.

Some hypotheses link the formation of Venus' larger coronae — those bigger than 310 miles (500 kilometers) in diameter — to mantle plumes and tectonic processes such as subduction and the delamination of denser parts of the planet's crust, the research team wrote in the study, published Sept. 16 in the journal PNAS. The smaller coronae — those with a mean diameter of about 124 miles (200 km) — on the other hand, can be attributed to smaller hot upwellings in the mantle, like blobs of wax rising in a lava lamp.

However, these theories have been difficult to substantiate.

"The current state of knowledge of the planet Venus is analogous to the 1960's pre-plate tectonic era because we currently lack an equivalent unifying theory capable of linking how heat transfer from the planet's interior gets manifested into the tectonics and magmatic features observed on Venus' surface," David Stegman, a professor of geosciences at the University of San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and one of the study's authors, explained in the statement.

Now, Stegman and his colleagues believe they may have found a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Cold material that sinks from the surface and hot material that rises from deeper inside both encounter a barrier at a depth of about 370 miles (600 km) — what the team calls a "glass ceiling." Most rising hot plumes aren't strong enough to break through this barrier, so they get deflected and spread sideways underneath it. Only the largest plumes can penetrate all the way to the surface, where they form huge volcanic rises. The material trapped beneath this ceiling stays warm, but it doesn't melt — so it acts like a hidden reservoir of heat in the mantle.

"This layer of warm fluid trapped between 600 to 740 km [370 to 460 miles] depth provides a global source of smaller-scale thermal instabilities," the researchers wrote in the study. "These plumes have a wide range of sizes since they do not necessarily obey classical boundary layer theory."

Using computational models, the team showed how these small-scale plumes beneath Venus' crust could form naturally. A cold "drip" of rock from the base of Venus' stagnant crust cools and becomes denser, and it eventually sinks into the hotter mantle below. This event then sets off a chain reaction that pushes up several pockets of hot rock.

In past studies, scientists had to start their geodynamic models with these hot blobs already in place below the lithosphere — the planet's rigid outer layer — to simulate how coronae and volcanoes form. However, this research has taken it a step further by showing a plausible natural origin for those initial conditions.

As these secondary plumes rise, melt and eventually sink again — interacting with Venus' mantle along the way — they could provide the variety of crown-shaped coronae seen across the planet's surface, the researchers proposed. The models suggest that this mechanism works when the mantle is 250 to 400 kelvins hotter than Earth's mantle, but it's still unclear how long such a state could last.

The scientists cautioned that more work is needed. Future studies should model plume dynamics in 3D, account for melting both inside and on the surface, include different mantle compositions, and track changes over Venus' entire history, they said. These steps will help to reveal how Venus' interior heat and movements shape the planet's coronae, volcanoes and overall surface.

Rocket Lab wants to bring NASA's Perseverance rover samples back from Mars.

As interest in Mars Sample Return (MSR) resurfaces, Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck says his company already has experience with the spacecraft and hardware needed to get the interplanetary job done.

The MSR mission has taken on new urgency since a Sept. 10 NASA announcement that a Martian surface sample collected by its Perseverance rover contains mineral textures indicative of a possible biosignature — potential evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet. Scientists say determining if those features were actually created by extraterrestrials will require studying them with terrestrial equipment, and Beck believes Rocket Lab can make that happen.

"As a planetary science geek … on my own personal quest to look for life on other planets, the recent Martian discovery is super exciting," Beck told Space.com in an exclusive interview.

He said Rocket Lab has all the right pieces in place for a Mars return mission, and "it would be great if that program got a new lease of life."

Perseverance is the first big piece of NASA's long-held MSR plan.. Since landing in February 2021, the rover has been drilling and filling tubes with Martian rock, leaving these sealed samples behind for a future pickup. The entire MSR campaign — from retrieval rover to ascent rocket to Earth return orbiter — is built around bringing home the samples that Perseverance is gathering.

That campaign, long envisioned to be a partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), has been in a state of programmatic evolution for more than a decade. The current framework calls for a NASA rover to retrieve Perseverance's dropped samples, a NASA Mars ascent vehicle (MAV) to launch them off the planet, and an ESA return spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with the sample container in Mars orbit and haul it back to Earth.

Costs ballooned as the architecture grew more complex, however, and the sample return timeline eventually extended into the 2040s. A 2023 review warned that the program's total costs could approach $11 billion, and NASA was forced to rethink its plan.

The agency launched a strategy review to explore cheaper, faster options in mid-2024, asking private industry, NASA centers and academics for ideas. Rocket Lab was among a handful of companies to submit a proposal.

As of now, NASA has not selected any of these concepts for development and has left MSR in a replanning phase with partial congressional support while the agency evaluates alternatives and NASA's budget remains in limbo on Capitol Hill.

Congress did, however, earmark $700 million in NASA's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal to begin work on a next-generation Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO). This is where Rocket Lab may be able to get its foot in the door, if its already-submitted proposal doesn't pan out.

Rocket Lab's MSR concept didn't alter parameters of NASA's mission outline, but Beck said the company's plan offered "a compelling way to get it done at a quick timeframe and a reasonable price," and included a communications orbiter from the outset.

"The MTO was always part of our architecture," Beck said. "Nobody sees a footprint on Mars unless there's a telecommunications orbiter."

Beck envisions a spacecraft in high areosynchronous orbit — the Mars equivalent to a geosynchronous orbit over Earth. From there, the MTO could use both radio frequency bands and laser comms payloads to relay data between Mars and Earth for decades.

"Having interplanetary laser optical comms would be a real leap forward with respect to bandwidth and not having to burden DSN [NASA's Deep Space Network]," Beck said.

He added that the orbiter would be sized "for human presence on Mars," not just robotic missions.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin also aspires to support NASA's Mars ambitions, and recently announced plans for its own MTO design, which the company said could be ready during the 2028 planetary alignment launch window. (Earth and Mars align for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.)

Beck points to all that Rocket Lab has already accomplished in space as the proving ground for each component needed to get to Mars and back. He said the company's vertical integration and mixed expertise of launch, spacecraft production and planetary hardware make it "uniquely positioned" to successfully execute a simplified MTO and MSR mission.

Large government programs, he argued, are slowed by compromises between contractors. "If you're in control of the entire mission, there is no compromise," Beck said.

Rocket Lab's current workhorse is the Electron rocket, which became the fastest launch vehicle to reach 50 missions, achieving the milestone in June 2024 — just over seven years after its debut. This year, it's on track to launch up to 20 missions. Beck said this is the first year he's lost track of the number. He called that realization "the definition of success."

Rocket Lab is also scaling up with Neutron, a partially reusable medium-lift rocket to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9. The company recently cut the ribbon on its Neutron pad in Virginia and is targeting a debut flight by year's end. Neutron will be the backbone of Rocket Lab's interplanetary reach, capable of launching probes to Mars and other deep-space destinations.

Beck pointed to Rocket Lab's dominance today in the small launch market as a reason he thinks the company can corner the interplanetary trade. "If you want to build a little rocket to get off a little planet, [Rocket Lab is] probably a good place to start," he said.

"You're standing on Mars looking back at Earth and going, 'Who's the company that can build the best small rockets in the world?' You'd probably end up with us."

Beck stressed, though, that Rocket Lab does far more than just rockets, and that the breadth of the company's capabilities make it well suited for the MSR mission. Over half of Rocket Lab's revenue now comes from its Space Systems division, which builds satellites, avionics, solar arrays and flight computers for deep space.

Through acquisitions like that of Sinclair Interplanetary in 2020, Rocket Lab has gained the expertise to produce components like reaction wheels, star trackers and power systems for the company's suite of satellite buses. SolAero was made part of Rocket Lab's Space Systems division in 2022, providing an inheritance of operational hardware on Mars — the solar cells that power several Red Planet spacecraft.

Rocket Lab has also already had success with deep-space comms. The company launched NASA's CAPSTONE mission, which used a cubesat to test navigation and communications in lunar orbit in 2022 for NASA's Artemis program. It also developed landing and guidance software for Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander, which delivered science payloads to the surface of the moon this past March, as part of NASA's CLPS program.

Rocket Lab also designed NASA's upcoming EscaPADE orbiters, a pair of small spacecraft headed to Mars that will study how the solar wind interacts with the Martian atmosphere. That mission is set to launch on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket before the end of the year.

Even with Mars on the horizon, Rocket Lab has its eyes on other worlds, too. Or, rather, has kept one world in particular in its peripheral vision: Venus.

Beck calls Venus a "passion project for nights and weekends" but insists it is worth the effort. He argues that the clouds of Venus remain one of the best places to search for signs of life in the solar system. "I think there's a real chance of actually finding a meaningful existence of life in the clouds of Venus."

"It's not a super high chance, but it's possible," Beck said. "And if it's possible, it must be done."

Stargazers in the U.S. will witness the razor-thin waning crescent moon rise close to Venus and the bright star Regulus in the predawn sky on Sept. 19, while others will see the lunar disk pass directly in front of the rocky planet, briefly occulting (or hiding) its light.

Head out two hours before dawn on Sept. 19 to find the slender form of the 2%-lit moon rising low on the eastern horizon with Venus visible as a bright morning star less than 1 degree below and Regulus — the brightest star in the constellation Leo — just beyond. Remember, the width of your little finger held at arms length equates to roughly 1 degree in the night sky.

Around this time, you may notice a subtle glow illuminating the shadowed region of the lunar surface, revealing the vast basaltic plains known as lunar maria, which formed billions of years ago from ancient lava flows. This phenomenon — called Earthshine, or the Da Vinci glow — can only be witnessed on nights surrounding a new moon phase, when the lunar disk is well positioned to bathe in sunlight reflected from Earth's surface.

Jupiter can be found shining high above the eastern horizon to the upper right of the moon in the late night hours of Sept. 19, embedded in the constellation Gemini with the bright stars Castor and Pollux twinkling to its left.

Stargazers in the U.S. will see the lunar disk drift closer to Venus and Regulus as dawn approaches. Those viewing from Europe, Canada and Greenland, along with parts of Russia, Asia and Africa will witness the moon pass straight in front of Venus, temporarily hiding it from view. The event — known as an occultation — will begin globally at 6:34 a.m. ET (1034 GMT) on Sept. 19 and will end at 10:26 a.m. ET (1426 GMT) the same day, according to in-the-sky.

Stargazers hoping to get a closer look at the constellations or planets of the solar system should read our roundups of the best binoculars and telescopes for viewing the night sky.

Editor's Note: If you capture an image of the moon with Venus with Space.com's readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Sometimes an unusual celestial sight will take place at a rather ungodly hour.

As a budding young amateur astronomer living in the Bronx, I remember the bemused look on my mother's face when I told her I was setting my alarm for 4 a.m. so that I could get a look at a meteor shower or lunar eclipse. "How come these things don't happen at a more convenient hour?" she would ask.

In retrospect, that was a good question, for it seems that most of my nightly forays to observe something interesting tend to occur in the hours after midnight. We have one such event coming our way early on Thursday morning, Sept. 19. But I assure you it will be something well worth getting up for.

A preview of winter

Probably the best month for stargazing is September. After the stretch of hazy, warm and humid summer nights running from June through August, September brings us cooler temperatures and generally clearer and more transparent skies. My good friend, George Lovi (1939-1993), who for many years penned the "Rambling through the Sky" column in "Sky & Telescope" magazine and was a colleague of mine at New York's Hayden Planetarium, was also a railroad buff. At the start of the summer season, in June, the brightest stars of Gemini the Twins, Pollux and Castor appear side by side low in the northwest twilight, bringing up the rear of the winter stellar procession in much the same way as the twin marker lights on a caboose bring up the rear of a train.

And during this week at around 9:30 or 10 p.m., if you look low down toward the north-northeast horizon, you'll see what George often referred to in his planetarium shows as the "headlight,": the brilliant golden-hued star Capella. If you want to watch the emergence of the rest of the "celestial train," then stay up all night. By the break of dawn, the southeastern sky, dominated by Orion and his winter retinue, will be magnificent.

Incidentally, if you don't mind the late hours, this is the time to observe the winter stars in comfortable temperatures. Compare September predawn temperatures in the 40's and 50's to mid-winter subfreezing (or in some parts of the country) subzero readings!

Ghostly lunar ball

And speaking of the break of dawn, that happens nowadays at around 5:15 a.m. local daylight time. And that's the time for when you should set your alarm clock Thursday morning, to see a tight gathering of three celestial objects: the moon, the brightest planet, and one of the brightest stars in the sky.

One prerequisite here is that you should have an unobstructed view of the east-northeast horizon. This "celestial summit meeting" will appear rather low — just 10 degrees above the horizon. As we have noted many other times, your clenched fist at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees in width. So, this celestial array will be sitting roughly "one fist" above the horizon.

The first object to catch your eye will be the moon. It will be a slender waning crescent, only 6 percent illuminated by the sun and just two days prior to the new phase. In addition, you may be able to see the full globe of the moon, appearing as a thin arc of yellowish-white light enclosing a ghostly ball glowing with a bluish-gray hue interposed between the sunlit crescent and not much darker sky. This vision is sometimes called "the old moon in the young moon's arms." Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the first to recognize it as earthshine.

That faint bluish-gray light is light from the Earth reflected back to the moon. The Earth's light of course is reflected sunlight, so earthshine is really sunlight which is reflected off Earth to the moon and reflected back to Earth. The season of year and an observer's latitude determine the angle a line joining the crescent moon's cusps make with the horizon and on this morning this line is more nearly horizontal, making the crescent looking more like a cup that might hold water — call this a "Wet Moon" if you want to follow old-time tradition.

Queen and a king get together

The next object that stands out is the planet Venus; queen of the planets. It shines with its usual powerful radiance, though in telescopes it is now a rather small and featureless gibbous disk. Venus blazes at magnitude -3.9 and on the morning of Sept. 19, it will sit less than a degree to the lower right of the moon and itself will be positioned a half-degree to the upper left of the 1st-magnitude star Regulus, the brightest star of Leo the Lion. Venus outshines the star by a factor of 120 to 1, and yet their proximity for several mornings intensifies the contrasting yellow-white of the planet and bluish white of the star.

Copernicus has been credited with giving Regulus its name, a diminutive of Rex, or "king" which may relate to the four "royal stars" (with Aldebaran, Antares and Fomalhaut) about 90 degrees apart in the sky. Arabic astronomers gave the star the name "Qalb al-Asad," or "Heart of the Lion." Ancient Greek astronomers also referred to it by the same name, "Kardia Leontos."

As the brightest star in Leo, Regulus has been almost universally associated in ancient cultures with the concept of royalty and kingly power. This star lies in the handle of the so-called "Sickle of Leo," a star pattern resembling a large reversed question mark. The Sickle, when rising and climbing the sky at dawn, as it is doing now, is seen cutting upward. To modern sky-watchers the Sickle outlines the majestic head and mane of a great westward-facing lion.

Illusion of perspective

These three celestial bodies will appear to be "scrunched" in a line measuring less than 1 and a half degrees in length. Binoculars will accentuate the beauty of this alignment and will make the Earth-lit moon seem like an eerie three-dimensional ball. Keep in mind that what you will be witnessing will be an illusion. The moon will be positioned just 242,000 miles (388,000 km) from Earth. But Venus will be 153.1 million miles (217.3 million km) away, while Regulus is 79 light years distant.

So, the light you're seeing from Regulus now, started on its journey toward Earth in 1946, one year after the end of the second World War and the year of the premiere of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" and the introduction of the term "bikini."

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, Sky and Telescope and other publications.

Early risers are in for a spectacular show next week, when Jupiter, Venus and Mercury form a planetary lineup in the predawn sky on Sept. 1.

Look above the eastern horizon in the hours preceding dawn on Sept. 1 to find Venus shining among the stars of the constellation Cancer, with Jupiter visible as a bright point of light roughly 20 degrees to the amber planet's upper right. It's useful to remember the width of your clenched fist held at arm's length accounts for roughly 10 degrees of sky.

Mercury, meanwhile, will rise roughly an hour before the sun to form a near-perfect diagonal line with Venus and Jupiter that traces the path of the ecliptic — the narrow plane in Earth's sky that contains the orbits of all eight solar system planets. The latecomer will swiftly become lost in the glare of the morning sun, so be sure to find a spot with a clear view of the eastern sky to ensure a view of the planetary formation.

The planetary trio will indeed present a spectacular sight to the naked eye, but a telescope with an aperture of 6-inches or more will help reveal the four large Galilean moons surrounding the gas giant Jupiter, and display the moon-like phases of Venus and Mercury.

As always, the greatest care must be taken to never point a telescope or binoculars in the direction of the rising sun — particularly when viewing Mercury, which never strays far from the horizon — as doing so will permanently damage your eyesight.

Stargazers interested in seeing the planets for themselves should read our guides detailing the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the post-sunset sky. Photographers looking to upgrade their equipment ahead of the next big skywatching event should also check out our roundups of the best cameras and lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note: If you capture an image of Mercury with Venus and Jupiter and want to share it with Space.com's readers, please send your photo(s), comments, name and the location of your shoot to spacephotos@space.com.

During the wee hours of this morning (Aug. 31), a boxy spacecraft with solar wings in the shape of crosses flew right by Venus — if all went according to plan.

That probe is the European Space Agency's (ESA) JUICE ("Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer"), which is on its way to do just what you might expect after hearing its name.

The ultimate goal is indeed for JUICE to study our solar system's creamsicle-colored gas giant, but also to gather data about three of the planet's largest moons — Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. These three moons are believed to harbor oceans under their icy crusts, meaning they could be solid leads in astronomers' quest to find life beyond Earth. Europa in particular is a high-profile suspect for that agenda.

But if you're familiar with the arrangement of our solar system's planets, you may wonder why JUICE flew by Venus on its way to Jupiter — that's technically the wrong direction. The simple explanation is that JUICE can't really take a straight-line route to its destination. Rather, it's hopping around the gravitational tides of different worlds — it recently flew by the moon and then Earth again, for instance — as part of a larger, fuel-efficient effort to slingshot itself to the Jovian system.

Unfortunately for the public, JUICE operators had to turn off the spacecraft's sensors during the probe's Venus flyby because of the intense heat of the amber-hued planet's environment. What does that mean? No images.

In fact, according to a statement published by ESA on Aug. 25, JUICE even used its main, high-gain antenna as a "thermal shield" during today's encounter. That flyby peaked with a scheduled closest approach to Venus at 1:28 a.m. EST (0528 GMT) today.

The flyby comes after JUICE presented mission operators with a bit of a challenge in July, as the spacecraft stopped communicating information about its health and telemetry. Twenty hours of troubleshooting later, however, the team was able to find the robotic explorer's voice once again, and all was well.

The next stop for the nearly 13,300-pound (6,000-kilogram) probe will be Earth yet again.

"JUICE will use the gravity of Venus this week to bend its orbit around the sun and gain speed relative to Earth without using fuel," ESA wrote in the Aug. 25 statement. "JUICE will use the Earth flyby in 2026 to further fine-tune its trajectory."

From there, the probe will conduct one more orbit around the sun, the team explained, before returning to (you guessed it) Earth a final time in January 2029. Only then can it start thinking about the culmination of its journey. It should settle in orbit around Jupiter in July 2031.

Europe's most advanced interplanetary space probe lost contact with Earth for nearly a full day leading up to a crucial flyby of Venus that will occur on Sunday (Aug. 31).

The European Space Agency's (ESA) JUICE spacecraft launched atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in April 2023. The probe is bound for the Jupiter system, where it will study the gas giant and three of its four big Galilean moons — Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.

JUICE (short for "Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer") will reach its target in July 2031 with the help of four gravity-assist planetary flybys, which will increase the probe's velocity and slingshot it toward the outer solar system. The second of those flybys will occur this Sunday, when JUICE buzzes by Venus — but a communications glitch last month put the preparations for that encounter into jeopardy when the probe unexpectedly went dark.

A communications ping with the deep space antenna in Cebreros, Spain, failed to establish a connection with JUICE on July 16, according to ESA.

The routine comms protocol is designed to maintain confirmation of the satellite's telemetry and onboard systems status. When the probe failed to check in, mission operators were left scrambling to troubleshoot the issue as the probe's Venus encounter quickly approached.

"Losing contact with a spacecraft is one of the most serious scenarios we can face," said JUICE Spacecraft Operations Manager Angela Dietz in an Aug. 25 ESA statement.

After ruling out a malfunction in the communications infrastructure on the ground, engineers narrowed the problem down to two possibilities: a misalignment with JUICE's medium-gain antenna or an issue with the comms system's amplifier.

Mission managers feared that JUICE went into a protective safe mode and were left with two possible paths toward resolution, according to the ESA statement: Transmit commands "blind" to JUICE's presumed location along its flight path, in the hopes of triggering an activation command through a backup low-gain antenna, or wait two weeks for the spacecraft to automatically reset its communications systems. And, given the closing distance between JUICE and Venus, mission operators determined the latter was an untenable strategy.

“Waiting was not an option,” Dietz said. Doing so, she added, "would have meant delaying important preparations for the Venus flyby."

JUICE is currently flying about 125 million miles (200 million kilometers) from Earth, on the opposite side of the sun. At that distance, messages to the spacecraft and back take a 22-minute round trip.

Over the course of 20 hours, mission operators attempted to force-realign JUICE's medium-gain antenna, succeeding after their sixth transmission. Once communications were reestablished, the spacecraft was found to be in a healthy condition.

Technicians traced the malfunction to a glitch in JUICE's timing software that was responsible for powering the probe's communications amplifier on and off at the appropriate times. They issued a fix to prevent the issue from happening again

With communications reestablished, the team was able to begin preparations JUICE's upcoming Venus flyby on schedule.

JUICE's closest approach to the solar system's second planet is expected to occur at 1:28 a.m. EDT (0728 GMT) on Sunday. The probe will steal a small fraction of Venus' orbital momentum, helping propel it toward its next planetary flyby in September 2026, when JUICE will fly a quick loop around Earth.

JUICE's first gravity assist came from an August 2024 pass of Earth and the moon, which set the spacecraft on its current trajectory toward Venus. Another flyby of Earth will take place in January 2029, which will ultimately grant JUICE the velocity it needs to rendezvous with Jupiter in July 2031.

Ganymede, Callisto and Europa are all thought to harbor oceans of liquid water beneath their icy shells, making them excellent places to hunt for past or present signs of alien life. If all goes according to plan, JUICE will spend about 2.5 years in orbit around Jupiter, completing 35 passes of the gas giant's icy Galilean moons.

At the end of the mission, JUICE operators intend to alter the spacecraft's flight path to enter orbit around Ganymede, which will make the ESA probe the first spacecraft to orbit any of Jupiter's moons.

Unlike the stunning visuals transmitted during JUICE's first Earth/lunar flyby, Sunday's flight past Venus won't return any photos of the "morning star" planet. Because of heat limitations, mission operators are powering down the spacecraft's sensors. ESA will likely release a statement following the scheduled flyby.

Say hello to Earth's hellish twin! Venus may look serene from afar, but beneath its cloudy veil lies one of the most intense environments in the solar system.

Its surface is dotted with massive volcanoes, endless plains' and mysterious highlands. And those golden clouds? They're made of sulfuric acid. Perfect setting for a planet named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, right?

Despite its harsh conditions, Venus has long fascinated scientists. Could it have once harbored oceans or even life? Missions like Venera and Akatsuki have helped peel back the layers of mystery, but Venus still holds plenty of secrets waiting to be uncovered.

Whether you're a planetary pro or just curious about our cosmic neighbors, it's time to dive into the dazzling, dangerous world of Venus. Let's see if you can handle the heat — or if you'll get lost in the clouds.

Try it out below and see how well you score!