Why write 5 paragraphs poorly explaining something that can be understood in 5 seconds with a gif?

https://blog.matthen.com/post/112212054651

Edit: referring to the author struggling to explain the orbit pattern when it could be shown instead.

Thank you. That article was begging for a TLDR. The cooking blog effect but for science.

The GIF doesn't explain anything the article is about except that Venus orbits closer and faster than Earth. But that's just a little background for the article.

Here are relative orbital positions by month: https://www.theplanetstoday.com/

Indeed. I found all that guff about race-tracks and flags awfully confusing. Don't use metaphors, if a simple statement of the facts would do the trick.

I used to have a subscription to SciAm, but I cancelled it 30 years ago (partly because Martin Gardner stopped writing for them).

So if it's at its brightest when it's at the greatest apparent distance (angle) in the sky from the sun, but it's only half-lit in terms of the phase, why doesn't it get brighter when it gets closer to being a "full" Venus?

Because it is* much farther away from Earth and closer to the sun at that point.

Thanks, I was mentally ignoring the distance thinking it was not a big factor.

Being close to the sun (in angles from our viewpoint) makes sense, since the sky would start getting light when it was visible.

It’s an interesting exercise to calculate the two components of irradiance as a function of Venus’s angular distance from the sun: the 1/r^2 component derived from the Earth–Venus distance, and the geometric factor that depends on the angle of illumination. Combining these and finding the maximum, you should get the result mentioned.

I had been noticing it in the evenings and took a hand-held photo (May 25) with my phone[0]. I guessed it was Venus before taking the picture and was surprised that it wasn't just a bright blob.

Here's a random telescoe video[1] from 2015

[0] https://imgur.com/a/HEMkc0D

[1] https://youtu.be/oStzotcrfBc