Certainly won’t be a satellite, because to be stationary in the sky it would need to be geostationary and they are both very far away and so invisible and south from UK not west.
I will leave someone else to explain why Venus has been in the west so much recently…
Best
David
Yes its Venus - see previous posts on this
It appears to stay in the same place as both Venus & Earth are orbiting the sun in the same direction, albeit at different speeds. Venus takes 225 earths days to go round compared to earths 365 so every now & then we get to see Venus at this very bright stage
In interplanetary space terms speed & distance & relative positions between Venus & earth change slowly, so it appears unchanging but its not if you look carefully over time.
It will move out of view in the evening by the end of May, however it will reappear in the morning in the eastern sky at dawn from 13 June until the end of the year. Hence why Venus is both the so called ‘evening star’ & ‘morning star’.
Well done Mike! You are a fount of knowledge!
Best
David
Mike, is that some sort of app or website?
Thanks
Yes its a copy/paste from one of the www’s
I don’t have a regular one for that kind of stuff, just search & look for images, earthsky.org are pretty good.
When Jim refers to the earth rotating, I think he’s referring the earth rotating on its axis, not around the sun.
What puzzles me is this.
Venus’s position to the sun doesn’t change very much in the short term, IE. A few hours. So, as the sun moves out of view due to the rotation of the earth, on its axis, why doesn’t Venus do the same.
Afaik Venus was at its brightest on Wednesday
It does, the sun sets in the west moving towards north (in the northern hemispher)
Venus & all the star sky rotate following the same path.
Sun set tonight at my location is 20:27 (albeit I have a hill that affects that)
Venus sets at 0:33
Brilliant, cheers, its particularly back where we are in Germany so lucky for the sky
As Mike-B says, plus if you have some reasonable binoculars you should be able to just make out that it is a disk, not a pinpoint like a star. In tems of satellites, at a typical medium earth orbit height of say 20,000 km, orbiting every 12 hours so possibly appearing near stationary (and about half the height of geostationary Satellites, one would have to be over 3km across to appera simikar to the size of venus! The International Space station, at 73x109m a gigantic object compared to satellites, in its low orbit of about 400km is the largest any current man-made orbiting object can appear to us on Earth - and it will appear fairly similar size to Venus at the moment but would be visibly moving rapidly across the sky due to its low orbit,
Edit: apologies David, I don’t know how that slipped, it should have linked to @JimDog
Venus shows as a half disc at the moment, its now moving into a waning crescent phase as it disappears for a while before reappearing in the morning sky
Venus was at its maximum brightness on 28-April
Its next maximum brightness will be on 8-July-'20 in early pre-dawn morning.
Through small binos handheld and so dazzlingly bright it is hard to tell exact shape, but definitely something that magnifies to an object unlike a pinpoint star.
Hi IB, that’s the same as I get with my 42x10 bino’s, with my 77x18-54x fieldscope I see the shape.
Its the same on Saturn, bino’s show something like an oval shape, the 'scope shows up that the oval is the rings
My bins are 10x25 (though very bright for 25mm, as bright as a former pair of 10x50s as well as sharper!). I haven’t dug the ‘scope out recently.
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