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Because of the retrograde rotation, the length of a solar day on Venus is significantly shorter than the sidereal day, at 116.75 Earth days (making the Venusian solar day shorter than Mercury's 176 Earth days — the 116-day figure is close to the average number of days it takes Mercury to slip underneath the Earth in its orbit [the number of ...
Venus was 0.7205 au from the Sun on the day of transit, decidedly less than average. [ 9 ] Moving far backwards in time, more than 200,000 years ago Venus sometimes passed by at a distance from Earth of barely less than 38 million km, and will next do that after more than 400,000 years.
A mean solar day (what we normally measure as a "day") is the average time between local solar noons ("average" since this varies slightly over a year). Earth makes one rotation around its axis each sidereal day; during that time it moves a short distance (about 1°) along its orbit around the Sun.
Comparison of the ephemeris positions with time measurements expressed in Barycentric Dynamical Time (TDB) leads to a value for the speed of light in astronomical units per day (of 86,400 s). By 2009, the IAU had updated its standard measures to reflect improvements, and calculated the speed of light at 173.144 632 6847 (69) au/d (TDB).
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Venus: . Venus – second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. It has the longest rotation period (243 days) of any planet in the Solar System and rotates in the opposite direction to most other planets.
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The observation by Mikhail Lomonosov of the transit of 1761 provided the first evidence that Venus had an atmosphere, and the 19th-century observations of parallax during Venus transits allowed the distance between the Earth and Sun to be accurately calculated for the first time. Transits can only occur either in early June or early December ...