Venus
Planet
The morning and evening star — love, value, and beauty.
In the sky right now
Scorpio 3°36′
Ecliptic longitude 213.62°
Currently retrograde
Daily motion -0.560° per day
Retrograde cycle
- StatusRetrograde
- Stationed retrogradeOct 3, 2026
- Goes directNov 14, 2026
- Venus retrogrades about every 19 months, for roughly 40 days. Its retrograde stations trace a five-pointed pattern around the zodiac over eight years.
Astronomy
- Average distance from the Sun
- 108.2 million km (0.72 AU)
- Orbital period
- 224.7 Earth days
- Rotation period
- 243 Earth days, retrograde — it spins backwards
- Diameter
- 12,104 km — nearly Earth's twin in size
- Surface temperature
- about 465 °C — the hottest planet
- Atmosphere
- 96% carbon dioxide, sulfuric acid clouds, 92× Earth's pressure
- Moons
- None
- Brightness
- The third-brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon
Planetary facts follow NASA and JPL reference data. Moon counts reflect IAU-recognised satellites as of August 2026. Zodiacal positions and retrograde stations are calculated live using the app's VSOP87/NOVAS-derived astronomy engine rather than being hard-coded. The lunar nodes shown are True (osculating) nodes, computed from the Moon's instantaneous orbital plane — the same convention Astro.com uses by default.
Greek & Roman mythology
Greek
Aphrodite
Roman
Venus
Hesiod's Theogony gives Aphrodite the older and stranger origin: born from sea-foam where the severed genitals of Uranus fell into the water, she came ashore at Cyprus. Homer instead calls her the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Both versions circulated side by side.
She was goddess of love, desire and beauty, but also — as Aphrodite Areia in Sparta — of war, and her cult at Corinth and Cyprus carried older Near Eastern influence from Inanna and Astarte.
Venus was an Italian goddess of gardens and cultivated growth before the Greek identification took hold in the 3rd century BCE. Rome then made her a national ancestor: Julius Caesar's family, the Julii, claimed descent from Venus through Aeneas, and he dedicated a temple to Venus Genetrix in 46 BCE.
In a natal chart
Venus governs love, attraction, pleasure, taste, art, money and what a person considers valuable — both in relationships and in things.
It never appears more than about 47° from the Sun, so it sits within two signs of the Sun in any chart.
Venus rules Taurus and Libra, is exalted in Pisces, in detriment in Scorpio and Aries, and in fall in Virgo.
Rules: Taurus and Libra
See where Venus falls in your chartExplore the rest of the sky
Don't write your paper based on this page. We keep the facts as accurate as we can, but moon counts get revised, missions rewrite the textbooks, and the live positions are computed on the fly — treat this as a reliable starting point, not a real-time oracle.