Shine Venus, shine

摘要

On a cold January evening in 1643, the Italian Jesuit priest and astronomer Giovanni Riccioli turned his humble spyglass towards Venus, Like many observations he had made on previous apparitions, Venus presented itself like a miniature version of the crescent moon, but as he peered through the eyepiece something else caught his eye. The nighttime hemisphere of Venus, he noticed, was not perfectly invisible but seemed to glow in an eerie grey-red hue, much like the earthshine that dimly lights die nighttime hemisphere of our Moon, Since men hundreds of seasoned observers, including the great Sir William Herschel and Johann H Schroeter, made clear reference to its 'orange coloured hues' in their observation notes without ever offering an explanation for1 its existence Still others doubted its existence.