Astronomy Blog

Phase of Venus animation

Like the Moon, the planets Venus and Mercury can both appear in crescent phases. As Venus is a bit nearer to us than Mercury, our sister planet's phases are easiest to see with a small telescope. In fact this was one of the observations made by Galileo almost 400 years ago and was a good piece of evidence to show that Venus orbits the Sun between the Earth and the Sun. Ian Musgrave has been putting together images of Venus that he took between 11 February 2006 and 26 June 2006 into an animation (450 kB GIF). What you can see is both the changing phase and the changing angular size as it moves further from us. Check it out.