Honestly, asking "how was Venus found" is a bit like asking who discovered the ocean. It’s always been there, glaring at us. If you step outside right after sunset or just before dawn, it’s often the brightest thing in the sky that isn't the Moon. Because of that, there isn't one "Aha!" moment or a single guy in a lab coat who gets the credit.
Instead, the discovery of Venus is a multi-layered saga. It spans thousands of years, moving from ancient "star" worship to 17th-century telescope drama and eventually to Soviet probes melting on its surface.
The Ancient Eyeballs: 1600 BC and Earlier
Long before telescopes were a thing, people were already obsessed with Venus. But they didn't call it a planet. To the ancients, it was the "Morning Star" and the "Evening Star." They actually thought it was two different objects for a long time.
The Babylonians were probably the first to get serious about tracking it. We have the Ammisaduqa Venus Tablet, which dates back to roughly 1600 BC. It’s basically a 21-year spreadsheet carved into clay. It tracks when the planet rose and set. They called it Ninsi'anna, or the "Divine Lady, Illumination of Heaven."
You’ve also got the Mayans. These guys were the MVPs of Venus observation. They built entire calendars—like the ones in the Dresden Codex—based on the 584-day cycle of Venus. For them, its appearance wasn't just pretty; it was a signal for ritual, war, and agriculture. They realized the "two stars" were actually one body long before most other cultures did.
Galileo and the Telescope Shake-up
Everything changed in 1610. That’s when Galileo Galilei pointed his crude, "two-lens" telescope at the bright light in the sky.
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What he saw was a total game-changer. Venus had phases.
Just like the Moon, Venus waxed and waned. Sometimes it was a thin crescent; sometimes it was a fat "gibbous" shape. This was the smoking gun for science. See, in the old-school "Earth is the center of the universe" model (the Ptolemaic system), Venus should never show a full set of phases.
By proving that Venus went through a full cycle of light, Galileo proved that it orbited the Sun, not us. It wasn't just a discovery of a planet; it was the discovery of how the whole solar system actually works.
The Weird Discovery of the Atmosphere (1761)
So, we knew it was a planet. We knew it went around the Sun. But we didn't know it was a hellscape.
In 1761, a rare event called a Transit of Venus happened. This is when Venus crosses directly in front of the Sun from our perspective. Scientists all over the world scrambled to watch it. One guy, a Russian polymath named Mikhail Lomonosov, noticed something funky.
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As Venus began to touch the edge of the Sun, he saw a "hair-thin" arc of light or a "bulge" around the planet’s silhouette.
Lomonosov made a bold call: he claimed this was caused by the refraction of sunlight through a thick atmosphere. He was right. While other astronomers were busy trying to use the transit to calculate the distance to the Sun, Lomonosov figured out that Venus wasn't just a dead rock. It had air. A lot of it.
Radar and the Soviet "Venera" Era
For centuries, the surface of Venus was a total mystery because of those thick clouds Lomonosov discovered. You couldn't see through them with a normal telescope.
In 1961, scientists started bouncing radar signals off the planet. This gave us the first real look at its size and rotation. We found out something bizarre: Venus rotates backward (retrograde) and very slowly. A day on Venus actually lasts longer than a year on Venus.
Then came the hardware. The Soviets were obsessed with Venus. Their Venera program was basically a series of "crash and learn" missions.
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- Venera 4 (1967): First to send back data from inside the atmosphere. It got crushed by the pressure before it hit the ground.
- Venera 7 (1970): The first spacecraft to actually land on another planet and send data back to Earth. It survived for about 35 minutes in 900-degree heat.
- Venera 13 (1982): Gave us the first color photos of the surface. It looked like a jagged, orange-tinted desert of volcanic rock.
What Most People Get Wrong About the Discovery
People often think "discovery" means seeing it for the first time. But with Venus, the real discovery was realizing what it wasn't.
Early sci-fi writers in the early 1900s thought the clouds meant Venus was a swampy, tropical jungle. They figured if it has clouds, it has rain, right? It wasn't until the Mariner 2 flyby in 1962 and later radar mapping by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s that we realized it’s a volcanic pressure cooker.
Magellan used synthetic aperture radar to map 98% of the surface, revealing thousands of volcanoes and massive "pancake" domes of lava. We "found" the real Venus through radio waves, not visible light.
Why This Matters Now
We’re still finding things out about Venus. In the last few years, there’s been a massive debate about phosphine gas in the clouds—a possible sign of life (though very controversial).
New missions like NASA’s DAVINCI and VERITAS, and the ESA’s EnVision, are set to launch in the late 2020s and early 2030s. We’re going back to find out if Venus used to be like Earth before a runaway greenhouse effect turned it into a furnace.
Actionable Insights for Stargazers
If you want to "find" Venus yourself, you don't need a PhD or a Soviet probe.
- Check the Horizon: Look West shortly after sunset or East shortly before sunrise. If you see a "star" that doesn't twinkle and looks way too bright to be real, that's it.
- Use an App: Download a sky map app like SkyView or Stellarium. It'll confirm what you're looking at in real-time.
- Get Cheap Binoculars: Even a basic pair of 10x50 binoculars can sometimes reveal the crescent phase of Venus if the timing is right.
Keep an eye on the news for the next decade. We’re about to "rediscover" Venus all over again when those new probes finally drop through the clouds to see what’s actually happening on the ground.