Venus

PLANETTerrestrial planet

[

OVERVIEW

] PLANET

Venus is a terrestrial planet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 0.72333566 . It has a mass of 0.82 and a mean radius of 0.95 · 6052 . It has been known since antiquity.

Earth's twin in size and nothing like it in temperament: a runaway greenhouse under sulphuric acid clouds, hot enough at the surface to melt lead, and spinning backwards.

WHAT IT IS: Terrestrial planet
HOW FAR: 0.7233
HOW BIG: 0.95 · 6052
ONE ORBIT TAKES: 225

[

THE MODEL

] CATALOGUED RADIUS

DRAG TO ORBIT

CALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · CATALOGUED RADIUS · DENSITY 5.24 G/CM³ FROM MASS AND RADIUS · RADIUS 6050 KM · RETROGRADE ROTATION · LIT FROM WHERE THE SUN IS · TURNING ABOUT ITS OWN POLE

Drawn from the catalogued radius and from the same properties the picture at the top of this page uses, at the distance a flight to it would stop. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, at their real positions and drawn from where the camera actually is — so the constellations are wrong, and that is the point. This is the sky from there, not the sky from here.

[

IMAGES

] 4 FRAMES

NASA/JPL-Caltech
Public domain
Kevin M. Gill
CC BY 2.0
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Public domain
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher
Public domain

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see Venus for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.

TONIGHT

Say where you are, and this line says when Venus is worth going out for.

WHERE IT IS NOW FLY TO VENUS

[

THROUGH AN EYEPIECE

] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECE

1.9′ ACROSS

Bright enough to pick out with your eyes alone, and from a lit street as well as a dark one. Today it is 28.1″ across. It stops being a point of light at about 2×, and at 48× it is a clear disc with an edge you can see.

: 48×
: 1.08
: 1.25
: 13.0
: 28.1
LIT BY THE SUN: 42% of the face
SHOWS A DISC FROM: 2×
AS WIDE AS THE MOON LOOKS AT: 66×
MAGNITUDE TODAY: −4.58 · within reach

Computed for 2026-08-27 from the centre of the Earth, and from the mean radius the catalogue holds. A distance changes daily, so this width is a fact about that date and not about the body.

[

CATALOG DATA

] 12 FIELDS

The raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.

WHAT IT IS MADE OF

What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.

Mean temperature: 464
Rotation period: 243.02 , retrograde
Moons: 0

WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES

Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.

North pole (RA): 272.76
North pole (Dec): 67.16

THE ORBIT

The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.

Orbital period: 224.7
Eccentricity
Inclination: 3.39
Longitude of ascending node: 76.68
Longitude of perihelion: 131.6
Mean longitude: 181.98
Element epoch: 2451545.0000

[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 1 DESIGNATIONS

Common name Venus

[

CITE THIS PAGE

] DR1

This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.

PLAIN TEXT

SpaceCatalog. Venus [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/venus

BIBTEX

@misc{spacecatalog_venus,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{Venus}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/venus},
  note         = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from SpaceCatalog curated data.}
}

The values above were taken from SpaceCatalog curated data — CC-BY-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.

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