IF YOU'VE been up before sunrise on any clear morning recently you will have seen a brilliant blue-white morning star blazing in the south east. This is actually a planet, Venus.
This is just about the brightest Venus will get all year, and it really is a stunning sight. But as beautiful as it looks in the sky it is a hell planet. It rains acid on Venus, and millennia of global warming has given it a surface temperature of more than 400C. Add a choking atmosphere of poisonous carbon dioxide, and crushing atmospheric pressure, and you get the most deadly world in the solar system.
Shame when it looks so lovely!
Stuart Atkinson
Eddington Astronomical Society of Kendal
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