@geometry.in.nature Orbital Geometry in the Cosmos. "The Pentagram of Venus", Earth:Venus 8:13 orbital relationship near resonance.
The animation is based on data from University of Wisconsin geoscientist Steven Dutch, who created an interactive graphic in 2012, demonstrating how Venus's closest orbital points to Earth, over eight years, map out the points of a "remarkable, but not perfect" pentagram in the sky.
"The orbits are approximated as circles, so this animation cannot be used for 100% accurate predictions," Dutch stated.
All planets have elliptical orbits, making these diagrams simplified representations of the real deal. But they aren't radically far off, especially in Venus's case. Venus has the most circular orbit of any of the planets in our Solar System. In a measure of eccentricity - how much an orbit deviates from a circle - Venus scores 0.007, whereas Mercury, with the most elliptical planetary orbit in our Solar System, has an eccentricity of 0.21. This measurement is the ratio between a planet's farthest and nearest orbital point from the Sun, and gives a sense of how elongated the ellipse is.
In 8 Earth years, Venus goes around the Sun almost 13 times. Actually, it goes around 13.004 times.
During this 8-year cycle, Venus gets as close as possible to the Earth about 13 – 8 = 5 times.
And each time it does, Venus moves to a new lobe of the pentagram of Venus! This new lobe is 8 – 5 = 3.
When Venus gets as close as possible to us, we see it directly in front of the Sun. This is called an inferior conjunction.
So, every 8 years there are about 5 inferior conjunctions of Venus.
3, 5, 8, 13 are consecutive Fibonacci numbers.
As you may have heard, ratios of consecutive Fibonacci numbers give the best approximations to the golden ratio φ = (√5 – 1)/2.
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