For the past couple of weeks, we’ve had an extraordinary view of Venus starting before dusk, about as bright and easy to locate as it gets. Of course, that means if we were standing on Venus, Earth would be easy to see and locate in the Venusian night sky as well. It’s interesting to think about what our home planet would look like from this perspective, and of course, we’ve seen Earth from Mars with the rover missions there.

Venus’s weather is hot and terrible with 200+ mph winds nearly constantly- there are no “seasons”, and the atmosphere is almost all carbon dioxide. Long hostile to any life that may have been there sometime in the last 4 billion years (at least, we think), Venus is close to the same size as Earth, but spins in the opposite direction. As our closest planetary neighbor, it’s been studied going all the way back to the Mayans, and Galileo made a detailed study of it as well. Venus was the first to have an interplanetary probe, going back to 1962, when NASA’s Mariner 2 landed and determined the surface temperature to be 880 degrees F. Many mountains and volcanoes cover the planet, and its bright white appearance comes from heavy cloud cover reflectance and significant albedo.

As I stand on the snowy ground of the North Plains on the cold clear night on planet Earth, I look to the horizon and think of our blue marble in my mind’s eye from the perspective of our solar system neighbor, keeping us close company on our infinite journey through time and space.