2026-10-25

Venus' "analemma" over $8$ years

After the post on Jupiter's "analemma" over $12$ years, I wanted to do the same for Venus, an inner planet. Venus' orbital period of $224.701$ days makes it so that $13$ orbits of Venus are approximately equal to $8$ Earth years (with the error being less than a day). This means that roughly every $8$ years Venus comes back to the same approximate position in the sky - good enough to consider it a closed curve as far as its "analemma" is concerned.

Since Venus is an inner planet, its mean meridian transit period is effectively a mean solar day. I took Stellarium screenshots with a gap of $6$ days spanning the required $8$ years. This was then rendered into a movie that I've uploaded to YouTube (see below).

A bonus is that the Sun's analemma can also be seen in the video as the Sun traces out the figure-8 image near the central meridian.

Please manually select the High-Defintion (1080p) quality if YouTube serves up a lower quality version.


I manually traced out the "analemma" curve for Venus and overlaid it on the first image. The path is basically a Lissajous curve and very complex indeed. (Since the curve was manually traced based on Venus' positions in the screenshots, there are quite literally some rough edges in there.)

Venus' "analemma" over $8$ years

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