Venus Returns

An old friend is returning to view about now — the planet Venus, the brilliant “evening star.” It’s quite low in the west at sunset, so any trees or buildings along the horizon will block it from view. Because it’s so bright, though, if you have a clear horizon you should be able to pick it out.
Venus shuffles back and forth between morning and evening skies. And it repeats itself as it does so. It traces a series of five patterns that repeat every eight years. So in late February of 2026, Venus will stand almost exactly where it is tonight.
That’s because the orbital cycles of Earth and Venus are nearly synchronized. For every eight times that Earth orbits the Sun — a period of eight years — Venus orbits the Sun 13 times.
That could be an orbital resonance — a physical link caused by the gravitational pull that Earth and Venus exert on each other. But the cycle is off by a tiny bit, so the timing could be just a coincidence.
No matter the cause, though, it makes it easy to predic