Venus blazes in the dawn sky from July through to August, while Mercury, Mars, Uranus and Neptune also take the morning watch

Planet of the month

Between mid-July and mid-August many summer sky-watchers will be able to see all seven of Earth’s sister worlds strewn across the sky. However, one planet will dominate the pre-sunrise sky, the world that many people know as the ‘morning star’ or ‘evening star’ and is often - very misleadingly - called ‘Earth’s Twin’. That planet is Venus, the closest planet to Earth.

Venus is the second planet out from the Sun, and earned its stellar nicknames from the way that it sometimes blazes in the west after sunset and at other times blazes in the east before sunrise. As for that other nickname, it couldn’t be less of a twin to Earth if it tried. Yes, it’s roughly the same size as our planet, so there is a similarity there, but its carbon-dioxide atmosphere would be poisonous to us, its acid rain would burn us and its furnace-hot surface temperatures would be lethal to us long before the crushing atmospheric pressure on its flat, rocky plains killed us. All of these inhospitable conditions are down to its thick, curdled atmosphere, which traps the Sun’s heat and pushes the temperature on its surface to over 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit).