Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Tuesday, September 28th.  The sun will rise at 7:36.  It’ll be up for 11 hours and 51 minutes, setting at 7:28.   The moon, 2 days before last quarter, will rise at 10:00 this evening.

Venus, if you can catch it before it sets at 8:13 p.m. is a very thin crescent.  Venus is visible as a crescent even in binoculars now.  A very tiny and thin one.  Though the planet Venus is very close to the earth now, it is difficult to see.  It is low in the sky, setting very soon after the sun.  Being low in the sky, telescopes cannot see good detail on its surface, if we could see it at all, which we can’t.  Venus is cloud covered.  Its dense atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide is covered by layers of sulfuric acid clouds.  Two decades ago the Magellan spacecraft orbited the planet with radar and mapped the hellish surface.  In roughly the same period the Soviets landed probes on its surface to see its barren landscape lit by a dim reddish sun.

Times are for the Grand Traverse Area of Northern Michigan, USA.