Many summers ago, I stopped at a familiar rock in a meadow while running in the hills behind Aqua Caliente. This meadow afforded a beautiful view down a canyon that framed the lower Sonoma Valley and the San Pablo Bay and otherwise was ringed in oaks and yellow brown fields of summer grass.

What caught my eye this day was not the view toward the bay. Instead, when I happened to look up from my vantage point, I noticed that there was an object in the noon sky that looked like a star--faint, but quite noticeable once I knew where to look for it. I wondered if it were a comet or some other bright and temporary celestial body that I had somehow missed in the news. I learned later from an astronomer at the Lick Observatory that in fact what I was seeing was not too uncommon. It was Venus. Every few years evidently, Venus becomes this bright as the earth and Venus orbit the sun and line up to maximize this effect. It stands out plainly then, even in the daytime. It is visible again today, and it is clearly visible in the evening sky. (March, 1996)

Venus is the second of the planets in our solar system, a planet so bright and inspiring that it has held a special place in the mythology of many cultures. As the first goddess mentioned in history, it was Inanna to the Sumerians. To the Babylonians it was Ishtar, goddess of love and war. Ishtar is linked to Astarte, a similar goddess to the Phoenicians, and likewise to Ashtoreth, for the ancient Semitic cultures. To the Hellenic Greeks it was Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, which was later incorporated by the Romans into the goddess Venus.

Venus has also been a beautiful, distant attraction for those with a passion to explain the heavens, at least since Galileo used his telescopes to sketch its crescent phases in the 1600's. His work was a strong confirmation of the radical theory of Copernicus that the earth was in an orbit around the sun. The position of Venus as an "inferior" planet, or one that orbits inside the orbit of the earth, was clearly demonstrated with the observation of these phases. A planet outside of our orbit would never show such a dark phase to us. More recently, we have launched more than 20 spacecraft to learn about it, including the recent US Magellan spacecraft that has used radar to penetrate its dense cloud cover and map its surface in surprising detail.

Venus is often called our sister planet and until recent data confirmed otherwise, it was considered the most likely to share life with us. It is nearly 95% of the size of the earth, and has about 80% of the earth's mass, with a very similar composition including a solid crust and a molten interior. It travels in a near perfect orbit that is 72% of the earth's distance to the sun (93,000,000 miles). It once had plenty of water. We now learn that the surface of Venus is hot, averaging nearly 850 degrees (Fahrenheit), hotter than Mercury which is twice as close to the sun. This is the result of a "runaway greenhouse effect" from its carbon dioxide atmosphere that traps heat. All its water is gone and its dense clouds are made of sulfuric acid. Life is not very likely at all there. Apparently, the earth would be in the same condition had it been a little closer to the sun.

Passion has always been a part of our association with Venus. No doubt its lesson of what happens when there is too much heat is worth remembering. On the other hand, Venus is likely to remain an important reminder of beauty that motivates us.