[masraum]

Originally Posted by ckissick

Since Venus is inside earth's orbit, we only see it at full phase, like a full moon, when it's farthest away from earth. Since brightness is proportional to the square of the distance, and the distances are so great, it's not very bright when it's in its full phase. It turns out that it's at its brightest when we can see only 26% of it, because it's very close at that time. In fact, at its brightest, it's 4.16 times brighter than when it's full. Right now it's at about 1/2 phase.

You clearly just made all of that up! It's only a matter of time before we start getting "super Venus" emails to go with the super Moon and super Mars emails..

Makes sense. It is quite bright lately.

So far I've managed to see Mercury, Venus, Earth (tough one!), Mars, Jupiter and the Galilean moons, Saturn, and Uranus. I still need to grab Neptune, Pluto, Ceres, and Vesta.

I also have this shirt.