OUR BRILLIANT MORNING STAR--

WOW! Take a look at your lower eastern sky about 6 a.m. on the next clear morning. It will look like someone is shining a flashlight into your eyes—from space.

That extraordinarily bright image is the planet Venus.

Venus far outshines all true stars, but, unlike stars which are producing their own illumination, Venus is simply reflecting the light of our star, the Sun.

Since she is between us and the Sun she is always close to the Sun; hence her brightness, and only appears in the morning or evening sky. She has a diameter of some 7,575 miles; just a fuzz smaller than Earth.

While you are up and about at that hour look overhead toward the south and find nearly everyone’s favorite constellation Orion. The “Hunter” is easy to identify with its three nearly identical belt stars in a very straight alignment.

Hold your hand at arm’s length and put the heel of your flat palm on Orion’s head. About 1 and ½ times the width of your hand and nearly straight north you will see a fairly bright “star” with a reddish cast.

That’s Mars!

Compared to Venus she looks fairly mediocre in brilliance. That’s because that planet is smaller—about 4,200 miles in diameter—and much farther from the sun. She has a warm hue because of her heavily oxidized surface.

Saturn also may be visible for you in this part of the sky. She is following Venus in climbing above the eastern horizon and about twice the width of your hand toward the north. But, I think she is overtaken by the growing daylight before she climbs above my wooded, eastern view.

That problem will fix itself as our length of day continues to shorten.