Night flight to Venus - clear sky - enjoy the planet nearer Moon

Even during the melee of Covid-19, something else too is happening – we are hearing more birds chirping, animal noises, generally calm atmosphere and night sky is beautiful .. .  tried capturing Moon and Venus together but failed !!

To commemorate the conclusion of Women’s History Month, celebrated annually in the month of March, the U.S. sports network ESPN is dedicating  a full day of programming to historic moments in women’s sports on Sunday, March 29, and both Serena and Venus Williams will play a starring role.  The programming block will begin at 4 a.m. ET on ESPN2, with an airing of Nine for IX: Venus vs., and run throughout the day.   The film, produced by famed American filmmaker Ava DuVernay and released in 2013, chronicles Venus Williams’ fight for equal pay for women at Wimbledon that began in 2005.

Have heard of this song ‘Night flight to Venus’ .. …   the third studio album by Euro-Caribbean group Boney M., released in July 1978. The album became a major success in continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Canada, topping most of the album charts during the second half of 1978 and also became their first UK number one album. In Canada, it received a nomination for a 1980 Juno Award in a category 'International Album of the Year'. Nightflight to Venus includes their worldwide hits "Rivers of Babylon" and "Brown Girl in the Ring".  Boney M. group was  created by German record producer Frank Farian. Originally based in West Germany, the four original members of the group's official line-up were Liz Mitchell and Marcia Barrett from Jamaica, Maizie Williams from Montserrat and Bobby Farrell, a performing artist from Aruba.

Global leaders, celebrities, individuals and businesses from 190 countries and territories came together on Saturday, 28th March, to lend their support for the planet. A people-led movement, Earth Hour 2020 beautifully exemplified the resilience of the human spirit amid a crisis. At a time when people across the globe are battling a health crisis of an unforeseen scale, and many countries are under complete lockdown, supporters rose to the challenge of marking Earth Hour with online events.

Some websites directed that after Sunset, we could see  a beautiful pairing of the moon and Venus – and they can be seen without a telescope – generally in cities we don’t get to see clearer skies – due to city light refraction.  Read with interest that the  moon will be very close to Venus both Friday and Saturday evenings. The moon will be 11.4% illuminated Friday evening. On Saturday, the moon will be much brighter at 18.3% illuminated. The two are the brightest objects in the night sky.

Venus is in the sky until nearly midnight! Venus will remain high in the evening sky through April. But then it will drop quickly toward the horizon through the month in May as it swings to a position between us and the sun.  These Venus-moon rendezvous occur on roughly a monthly schedule. If Venus were stationary and did not appear to move against the star background, a Venus-moon encounter would occur every 27 days, 7 hours and 43 minutes. This is called a "sidereal month," which is the length of time it takes the moon to circle Earth once using the background stars as a reference point.

Venus, the second planet from the sun, is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty and is the only planet named after a female. Venus may have been named after the most beautiful deity of the pantheon because it shone the brightest among the five planets known to ancient astronomers. In ancient times, Venus was often thought to be two different stars, the evening star and the morning star — that is, the ones that first appeared at sunset and sunrise. In Latin, they were respectively known as Vesper and Lucifer.  However, further observations of Venus in the space age show a very hellish environment. This makes Venus a very difficult planet to observe from up close, because spacecraft do not survive long on its surface.

As the second-brightest natural object in the night sky after the Moon, Venus can cast shadows and, rarely, is visible to the naked eye in broad daylight. Venus lies within Earth's orbit, and so never appears to venture far from the Sun, either setting in the west just after dusk or rising in the east a bit before dawn. Venus and Earth are often called twins because they are similar in size, mass, density, composition and gravity. The size of Venus is only a little smaller than our home planet, with a mass that's about 80% of Earth's.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system. Although Venus is not the planet closest to the sun, its dense atmosphere traps heat in a runaway version of the greenhouse effect that warms Earth. As a result, temperatures on Venus reach 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius), which is more than hot enough to melt lead. Spacecraft have survived only a few hours after landing on the planet before being destroyed.  Venus takes 243 Earth days to rotate on its axis, which is by far the slowest of any of the major planets. And, because of this sluggish spin, its metal core cannot generate a magnetic field similar to Earth's. The magnetic field of Venus is 0.000015 times that of Earth's magnetic field.

Interesting !

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

29.3.2020.