Morning Star

In ancient times the planet Venus was called both the Morning Star and the Evening Star. Sometimes it appears in the east before dawn and sometimes in the western sky at sunset, so it can seem like two separate objects. Babylonians understood it to be one body, calling it “Bright Queen of the Sky.”  In the 1600's Galileo observed Venus has phases like the moon. Since it’s half-lit when farther from the sun in our sky and crescent-shaped when closer, he came to the radical conclusion that Venus orbits the sun and not the earth. In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown claims Venus draws a perfect pentagram in the sky every four years. That’s not quite true. The path of Venus does resemble a five-pointed star, but it takes eight years to do it. And it’s far from perfect. But then, perfection is highly overrated, anyway.