Just a pointlessly curious astronomy question: I were on Venus (or far more realistically, in orbit around Venus) and observed the Earth with my unaided eyes, would the Earth and the Moon appear as two individual (although close) points of light? Or are they sufficiently close together that all you’d see is the equivalent of the Morning Star for Venus?
NASA’s Solar System Simulator shows the earth and moon to be a bit more than a tenth of a degree apart when viewd from venus this morning. You should see that as two close points of light.
That’s cool!
Of course, it depends on what part of its orbit our moon is in - it could be directly in front of, behind, or to the side but touching (from Venu’s POV) the earth at other times.
I realised that pretty much the moment i posted the OP. Not only the position of the moon, but also the position of Venus relative to the Earth as well - I’d imagine it’d be harder to discern when Earth is on the opposite side of the sun.
As seen from Venus, the Moon would oscillate from side to side of the Earth each month, roughly in the plane of the ecliptic. The maximum separations would appear around the time of first and last quarter moon.
The amplitude of the oscillation depends on the distance of Earth from Venus, which varies from 25 million miles to 162 million miles. When the two are closest together, the Moon would swing as far as 1.09 degrees from Earth (about twice the diameter of the Moon as its seen in our sky).
The pair would be a spectacular sight. Earth would be extremely brilliant, more so even than Venus in our sky, because it would be in full phase (as would the Moon, of course). It would be of magnitude about -6.5. I’m not sure what the magnitude of the Moon would be, but it would be easily visible to the naked eye as a separate object, except near new and full Moon when it crept too close to the Earth and was overwhelmed by its glare.
At superior conjunction, Earth would be much less bright and the Moon would swing only 0.17 degrees away each month. During much of the month, you’d probably have trouble resolving it as a separate object.
Would you be able to see the Earth from the surface of Venus? From what I remember, the atmosphere isn’t likely to be clear - but I could be wrong. Sorry about the nitpick; you’d also burn, corrode, and be poisoned, too, but I thought the atmosphere is an important distinction here.
The OP did parenthetically state “in orbit around Venus”.
:smack: And I went back and re-read it just to make sure he hadn’t, too. Apparently i’m just blind.