If You Wanna See Venus, Better Hurry!

If you've been outside after sunset and looked to the southwest, you can't have missed the astonishingly bright beacon glowing over the horizon. That's Venus, the third brightest natural object in the sky (the International Space Station can sometimes briefly outshine it). Venus orbits closer to the Sun than Earth does and moves faster in its orbit. It's "catching up" to Earth right now, like a car on an inside circular track passing a car outside it. From our view, we see Venus growing larger a...