Anyone who’s even occasionally gazed into the Everett early evening sky this past winter and early spring has seen that bright “star” in the west. At first you might even mistake it for an incoming aircraft. In fact it’s so bright that at times it can even cast a faint shadow in the dark countryside. Actually that bright star is the planet Venus, named after the Roman goddess of love. Venus is a next-door neighbor to Earth and is also nearly the same size of our world, about 8,000 miles in diameter.
Venus is the second planet out from the sun orbiting our home star within Earth’s orbit. Currently it’s only about 108 million miles away and that’s one of the reasons it’s so bright right now. Venus’s brilliance is also due to its very bright and reflective cloud cover. Its atmospheric shell acts like a giant celestial mirror, reflecting all kinds of sunlight our way. Planets produce no natural light of their own and so the only way we see them is because of sunlight bouncing off of them. Venus is the best reflector in our solar system.
Despite its brilliance Venus is a really dull sight through any telescope, no matter how big and fancy your scope is. All you really see is an oval-ish white disk and that’s about it. There’s no way to see any of the Venusian surface. One thing that Venus does that’s mildly entertaining is that that it goes through phases just like our moon. Right now it resembles a gibbous moon but sometimes it’s crescent shaped, depending on where it is in orbit around the sun and where Earth is in its orbit.
This week and next Venus puts on a pretty good show as it celestially “hugs” the Pleiades, the brightest star cluster in the sky. Officially this hug is called a conjunction. The Pleiades are also known as the “Seven Little Sisters” because there are allegedly seven stars in the cluster you can see with the naked eye but most people including yours truly can only see six of the little shiners. In fact it looks just like a tiny Little Dipper and but the actual Little Dipper or Little Bear is much larger.
Venus is now forging eastward among the stars from night to night and is closing in on the Pleiades. Tonight look for Venus just a little below the Pleiades, just over five degrees away or about half the width of your fist held at arm’s length. As this week continues Venus draws closer and closer to the cluster. It makes its closest pass to the Seven Little Sisters this coming weekend, when Venus will only be a little over two degrees to the left of the Pleiades. That’s just over the width of two of your fingers held together at arm’s length. Next week Venus and the Seven Sisters will gradually pull away from each other.
Through a small telescope over even a pair of binoculars I think you’ll like what you’ll see. While Venus is just a blah bright light the Pleiades are another story. Depending on how strong your optics are, you can see up to a hundred stars in a sphere over 80 trillion miles wide. The Pleiades are much farther away than Venus, over 400 light years away with just one light year equaling nearly six trillion miles.
Like most open stars clusters, the stars of the Pleiades are young, probably around 100 million years old, which is extremely young when you’re talking about stars. In fact most of the stars in the Pleiades were born just before the dinosaurs on Earth got wiped out by a comet. Stars like the Pleiades are born in large groups out of large loose clouds of hydrogen gas called nebulae. These young stellar families stay together for millions and millions of years until gravity from neighboring stars starts tearing the cosmic siblings apart.
By the way I have one more nugget about the Pleiades star cluster. The Japanese refer to the Pleiades star cluster as “Subaru”. Sound familiar? Back in the 1950 seven small Japanese auto makers merged to form a large company they call Subaru, after the seven stars that make up the Subaru star cluster. In fact the early logo for the Subaru was an actual diagram of the cluster. They’ve updated their logo over the years but the present logo is still basically a cluster. Look at any Subaru and you’ll see what I mean.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist.
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