The 5 petals of Venus and its 8-year cycle
Look at the five petals of Venus' orbit. Guy Ottewell's chart shows a simplified map of the orbit of Venus at the center of the earth— centered on Earth, over an 8-year period from 2016 to 2023. Image by Guy Ottewell.
Guy Ottewell originally published the article as a blog post on his website Universal Workshop. Republishing here has been allowed.
What is the five-pointed star or petal of Venus?
When plotted at the center of the Earth—from the point of view of the center of the Earth—the motion of Venus has a very distinct rhythm. Eight years later, it will return to the same place in the sky on about the same day. This is known as an eight-year cycle, stemming from the fact that 13 orbits of Venus (8X224.8 days) are almost equal to 8 Earth years. This cycle was well known to ancient peoples such as the Maya and aroused their great interest. Today, many people refer to it as the five-pointed star of Venus or the five petals of Venus.
The word pentagram is used— or pentagon— because in eight years, every phenomenon—every relative position of the Earth, Venus, and Sun—occurs five times. Then, over the next eight years, they were repeated almost the same way five more times.
For Venus, the tight inward ring in the above and below animations is the lower conjunction of the planets, at which point Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun. As Venus moves away from us around the other side of the Sun, it swings sharply around the convergence center. So the general pattern is (as Anthony Barreiro commented) of a lovely five-petaled rose.
The tight ring on the inside is the flower bud of the rose, and the broad swing is the petal.
Imagine the petals carried out
Here's an animation that shows the same thing... Look at the orbit of Venus from the perspective of the center of the Earth. The smaller pale yellow dot is Venus, and the larger yellow orb is the Sun:
When I tried to draw an 8-year (2016-2023) map of the center of the earth to show the whole rose, it was confusingly messy. It has 5 overlapping orbits, 8 times — 12 small golden planets, intervals per month — without the ecliptic plane grid and other details already too much.
The image at the top of this article is a more simplified version: it's still a three-dimensional calculation, but by moving the viewpoint to the north pole of the ecliptic, it becomes a plane of Venus's trajectory.
The Earth is in the middle; the direction of the vernal equinox is to the right; the spots of the yellow dots are the sun at the beginning of each month.
The rest is the rhythmic movement of Venus.
It's still hard to tell which part of the trajectory is which year (in the top picture, I used white, cyan, magenta, yellow in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, 2021, 2022), but it doesn't matter. You can see five subordinate links, each in five directions.
The five-pointed star of Venus
If you go from each ring to the next, you'll find that they're not next to each other, but 2/5 of the distance, like the 5 points of a five-pointed star.
Pentagram image source: Wikipedia Commons Network
The inward union of Venus and Earth in the past and future
The five inward points of Venus have different characteristics due to their different positions in the true orbit centered on the Sun. The true orbit of Venus is oblique and slightly elliptical.
On March 25, 2017, Venus was in the constellation of Pisces, 8 degrees north of the Sun, 0.28 AU (astronomical unit, also known as Earth-Sun distance) from our Earth, with a disk diameter of 60 arcseconds (mostly dark).
On October 26, 2018, Venus was in the constellation Virgo, 6 degrees south of the Sun, 0.27 UUs from Earth; Disc diameter 62 arc seconds;
On June 3, 2020, Venus was in the constellation taurus, 0.5 degrees north of the Sun and 0.29 AU from Earth; The diameter of the disk surface is 58 arc seconds.
On January 9, 2022, Venus is in sagittarius, 5 degrees north of the Sun, 0.27 AU from Earth; The diameter of the disk surface is 63 arc seconds.
On August 13, 2023, Venus is near the edge of Cancer-Leo-Plesiosaurus, 7 degrees south of the Sun, 0.29 AU from Earth; The diameter of the disk surface is 58 arc seconds.
Summary: The rhythm of the motion of Venus, as observed from the geocentric perspective, is striking, as seen in Dan. Brown was mentioned in the film The Da Vinci Code. cover. Ortwell charted and explained why Venus' trajectory is five petal-shaped.
Related knowledge
Venus is the second closest planet to the Sun. It is named after Venus, the goddess of love and beauty in Roman mythology. Venus is the brightest natural object in Earth's night sky besides the Moon. It casts shadows and can be observed with the naked eye even in broad daylight. Venus is in earth's orbit around the sun, and it seems to follow the sun all the time, falling from the west shortly after dusk and rising from the east before dawn. Venus orbits the Sun for 224.7 Earth days, the length of the Confluence Day is 117 Earth days, and the rotation period of Venus is 243 Earth days. This means that Venus has a longer rotation period than the other planets in the Solar System, and rotates in the opposite direction to the planets of the Solar System except Uranus. This means that on Venus, the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. Venus has no moons around it, and only Venus and Mercury have no moons in the planets of the solar system.
Venus is an Earth-like planet, sometimes referred to as Earth's sister star, because of its size, mass, distance from the Sun, and composition of its body. It is very different from Earth in other ways. Of the four Terrestrial planets, Venus has the densest atmosphere, with more than 96 percent carbon dioxide. Its planet's surface atmospheric pressure is 92 times the air pressure at Earth's sea level, roughly equivalent to the pressure at 900 meters (3,000 feet) below Earth's water.
Although Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, Venus is the hottest planet on the surface of the Solar System, with an average temperature of 737 K (464 degrees Celsius, 867 degrees Fahrenheit). Venus is covered in an opaque, highly reflective cloud of sulfuric acid, making it impossible for us to see its surface condition from space. In the past, it may have had water quality oceans, but evaporated and dried up as temperatures rose due to the greenhouse effect. Its water molecules may have photolyzed, and free hydrogen was blown into interstellar space by the solar wind because Venus lacked the protection of the planet's magnetic field.
BY：Guy Ottewell
FY：Astronomical volunteer team
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