Skymatters: Venus appears to pass through a group of over 1000 stars in June

"On June 12th and 13th Venus appears to pass through a group of over 1000 stars known as the Beehive Cluster in the constellation of Cancer."

This image made available by NASA shows the planet Venus made with data from the Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter. On Wednesday, June 2, 2021.

The brightest object in this June’s evening sky, apart from the Moon, is the planet Venus. Earth’s so-called “twin” dominates the western horizon from before dusk until it sets around 1am. If you’re a regular stargazer you might notice that while it’s impressively bright, Venus doesn’t appear to jump out from its background with the same level of contrast as it does on a winter’s night.

Your eyes are not deceiving you. At this time of year, the Sun never actually sets far below the horizon and it continues to brighten up the night sky as its light is scattered off dust and aerosols and other molecules which populate our upper atmosphere. This is the same process which gives us blue skies during the day, albeit a rarer commodity in Ireland than we might like. At night, the brightness of the scattered light is too faint for our eyes to perceive in colour. Instead they automatically switch to working in black-and-white.