When I was 12 my know-it-all teenage brother took it upon himself to inform me that the evening “star” I’d been making wishes on for years was actually a planet. He claimed that due to this error on my part none of my past decade’s wishes would come true. I pretended this piece of new knowledge didn’t affect me one bit and continued chanting the lines “star light, star bright, first star I see tonight” just as I always had whenever the evening star came out. I told him the planet Venus was as capable of dispensing wishes as any distant sun and the fact that it was a planet was just another one of the ridiculous technicalities he was wasting his life on.
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Venus serves as the “evening star” seen in the west shortly after sunset. It’s also the “morning star,” the bright object that rises in the east before dawn. Occasionally Venus is out of view altogether, but when it’s visible it’s the brightest object, after the moon, in the night sky. In fact, it’s so much more brilliant than everything else that Mayan astronomers gave it equal status with the sun and moon, instead of lumping it in with the rest of the planets and stars as we’re inclined to do.
Venus closely resembles earth in many ways: both planets were constructed of the same material at the same time, and they’re approximately equal in size. Despite this kinship and despite our proximity, nothing was known for certain about what was on the planet for most of the 20th century. We knew much more about distant Saturn and Jupiter because the planet named for the goddess of love is shrouded in a thick, soupy atmosphere. “The clouds of Venus are . . . as opaque as marshmallows,” Galaxy magazine columnist Willie Ley complained in 1955. Yet the clouds are part of the reason Venus appears so bright: Only 20 percent of the sun’s light reaches the planet’s surface. The atmosphere bounces the rest of the rays back out into space, creating the shimmering apparition we see from earth.
Bummer. No swamp. No princess. And very little hope of finding a market for a new Mall of America.
I climbed the rest of the way onto the roof. The sky was clear, though still black with night. The Big Dipper hung directly overhead. The constellation Orion was setting in the west near the moon. I aimed my binoculars at the morning star. Magnified, it looked like a weird gleaming disk, more flying saucer than plane. Because I didn’t have a telescope, the planet didn’t appear crescent-shaped, but it clearly wasn’t a sphere either. Even without its full face visible it was by far the brightest object in the eastern sky.
