VENUS

… and I will give them the morning star.
— Revelation 2:28

Vital Stats:

Venus is almost exactly the same size as Earth. And Uranus is almost exactly the same size as Neptune. That this should happen twice in one star system suggests there's some mechanism in planet formation that tends to breed twins.

Orbital radius: 0.7 Earth's
Diameter: 0.95 Earth's
Mass: 0.9 Earth's
Gravity: 0.9 g
Year: 0.6 Earth's (225 days)
Day: 117 Earth's (2802 hours)

Points of Interest:

Viewed from space, Venus is a featureless white sphere, due to the thick cloud layer that covers it. The image here was taken by microwave.
Its atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide, and 92 times denser than ours. This adds up to a titanic greenhouse effect and is why the planet is about as hot as Mercury, despite being a lot further from the Sun.
Those hazy clouds that cloak the planet are sulfuric acid. If you want to go on thinking of Venus in terms of love goddesses, it has to be a very … intense kind of love.
If you take Venus as orbiting the Sun clockwise, then the planet itself rotates counterclockwise. Put together with the short year and long day, and this means that the Sun and the stars rise on opposite horizons, when viewed from Venus. (That is, if you could see anything through the cloud layer.)
And, while the Sun rises every 117 days in the east, any given star rises every 243 days in the "west" (or the "other east" or whatever).
The long day and the cloud layer may be related: Venus's rotation may have been slowed by the tidal effect of the Sun on that enormous atmosphere.
Venus has no magnetic field to speak of. This may be because of its slow rotation, or, ironically, it may be because its core is "frozen" (not molten), because so much of the heat has come out through the surface.
The heat came out through the mega-volcanoes that are a major feature of Venusian geology. Venus appears to have giant volcanoes instead of plate tectonics.
Venus has two main "continents" – land masses above the general level of the surface. They have been named Ishtar Terra and Aphrodite Terra.

Venus on Earth:

Any bright star over the eastern horizon at dawn is a "morning star," and any bright star over the western horizon at dusk is an "evening star," but The Morning Star and The Evening Star is Venus. One of the first accomplishments of astronomy was to realize that the Morning and Evening Stars were the same body, moving from one side of the Sun to the other. Venus is the brightest thing in the sky, after the Sun and Moon, and is often judged the most beautiful.

Accordingly, it was often given to the goddess of love and beauty, whoever that might be in various pantheons: Inanna, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus, Frigg. Friday is named for this planet, Frigg's Day, Vendredi in French, Venerdi in Italian.

Copper is the element alchemy associated with Venus, because Venus was the patron goddess of Cypress, the ancient world's main source of copper.

Venus is important in the history of science because Galileo first observed that it went through phases, like the Moon, including full and gibbous phases. For that to happen, Venus had to be on the far side of the Sun from Earth, and that was supposed to be impossible in the old Ptolemaic astronomy.

Venus was a very popular planet in earlier science fiction, where it was almost always pictured as a tropical world. Any natives were likely to be either intelligent dinosaurs or Polynesians In Space. Since Venus is now known to be a hellhole about as inhabitable as a working kiln, modern SF concentrates on schemes to terraform Venus—re-mold it into a habitable world.

Venus is hard to study because of a thick layer of cloud covering the whole planet. The Russians landed the first probes on Venus in 1972. They sent back a few pictures before they died. The Magellan orbiter mapped the planet by radar in 1989.

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