While this is also true for Mercury, Venus appears more prominent, since it is the third brightest object in Earth's sky after the Moon and the Sun. Orbiting inferiorly (inside of Earth's orbit), it always appears close to the Sun in Earth's sky, as either a 'morning star' or an 'evening star'. Venus has historically been a common and important object for humans, in both their cultures and astronomy. This allows Venus to be the most accessible destination and a useful gravity assist waypoint for interplanetary flights from Earth. Venus and Earth have the lowest difference in gravitational potential of any pair of Solar System planets.

The orbits of Venus and Earth are the closest between any two Solar System planets, approaching each other in synodic periods of 1.6 years. It takes 224.7 Earth days for Venus to complete an orbit around the Sun, and a Venusian solar year is just under two Venusian days long. The rotation of Venus has been slowed and turned against its orbital direction ( retrograde) by the strong currents and drag of its atmosphere. Venus may have had liquid surface water early in its history with a habitable environment, before a runaway greenhouse effect evaporated any water and turned Venus into its present state. Conditions perhaps favourable for life on Venus have been identified at its cloud layers. Venus is one of two planets in the Solar System that have no moons. Internal heat escapes through active volcanism, resulting in resurfacing instead of plate tectonics. Venus lacks an internal dynamo, and its weak induced magnetosphere is instead caused by atmospheric interactions with the solar wind. Internally, Venus has a core, mantle, and crust. These conditions are extreme enough to compress carbon dioxide into a supercritical state close to Venus's surface. At the surface it has a mean temperature of 737 K (464 ☌ 867 ☏) and a pressure of 92 times that of Earth's at sea level. Venus is notable for having the densest atmosphere of the terrestrial planets, composed mostly of carbon dioxide with a thick, global sulfuric acid cloud cover. It is a terrestrial planet and is the closest in mass and size to its orbital neighbour Earth. Following the right-hand rule for prograde rotation puts Ishtar Terra in the negative hemisphere and makes the axial tilt 177.36°.

^ Defining the rotation as retrograde, as done by NASA space missions and the USGS, puts Ishtar Terra in the northern hemisphere and makes the axial tilt 2.64°.

Jupiter hell range