Venus, the Second Planet

The Romans originally named Venus after their goddess of love & beauty (she was called Aphrodite in Greece) because of the beautiful bright Morning & Evening star. People even went as far as to call it Earth's Twin sister, due to its similar size to our world.

The Morning and Evening Star was the actual planet of Venus, but no one had any idea what the planet's surface was like until the 20th century, when space probes from America & Russia were sent to study it. They discovered Venus wasn't quite as beautiful as everyone had thought when images and readings came back about the surface.

The planet is so bright in our sky b/c a thick blanket of sulfuric acid clouds reflect a lot of the sunlight that hits the surface. What little sunlight that does filter down is trapped in a runaway greenhouse-effect on the planet's surface. On average the surface temperature is 900 degrees F, hot enough to melt lead. :S The air-pressure is also crushingly high, and comparable to the deep oceans on Earth in weight. The images the Russian probes sent back (before they melted from the intense heat), showed a rocky, pitted surface with shield volcanoes, lava flows, and very shallow craters. Not a very nice place to visit :/

Even stranger, is the fact that the planet rotates backwards, compared to earth. On Venus, the sun rises in the west (what little that can be seen), and sets in the east. Also, one year on Venus is 224 earth days long, but one of its DAYS is 243 earth days long! Can you imagine?! That planet's really slow when it comes to rotating!

Despite its hellish surface, radar readings allowed scientists to get creative and name a lot of its surface features after goddesses and famous women, such as Ishtar & Aphrodite Terra, Atlanta Planitia, Tethys Regio, Lavina Planitia, Sappho, Phoebe Regio, Rhea Montes (volcano), and Guinevere Planitia. You can see more if you look up a map of the planet.