Venus is one of the brightest objects in the sky, so it is clearly visible to the naked eye. It can be tricky to see because it is always near the Sun. So it rises and sets with the Sun each day. Venus rotates "backwards," so the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east. Ancient civilizations believed they were actually two different objects, so they called the one, which rose the Morning …showed first 75 words of 1008 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1008 total…Venus is an inferior planet, it shows phases when viewed with a telescope from the perspective of Earth. Galileo’s observation of this phenomenon was important evidence in favor of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory of the solar system. While all of the planets orbit in an ellipse, Venus' orbit is the closest to a perfect circle. No one actually knows who really discovered Venus. However, much has been discovered about Venus in the past century.