Venus before the telescope was looked at with great wonder. Dancing uniquely through the skies Venus has been worshiped by many ancient cultures. She would come into the sky before night and chase the setting sun and disappear. Then she would rise higher and glow longer and brighter each night until she was the farthest from the sun, then reverse course back towards the sun. Venus would perform this dance again in the morning sky, after hiding for one week. First appearing just before dawn then earlier and longer, Venus heralds the new day. The Mayans of Central America were experts at tracking and predicting the date and direction of Venus' first appearance in the evening or morning sky, because the event was of great religious significance. To them Venus, called Kukulcan, was the Sun's brother, when Venus preceded the Sun it meant that there were important messages he carried to us from his brother. According to the Mayans, we owe our existence to Kukulcan, and their astronomer-priests paid with blood from human sacrifices. In the ancient Middle East, Venus was called Ishtar. They worshiped her as the goddess who evoked the power of the dawn. In ancient Sumeria when Venus, called Inanna, descended after the Sun into the kur, the "great below," it represented a frightening abandonment that threatened sterility and extinction of terrestrial life if she did not return. The Greeks associated the same beautiful brilliant speck in the sky with Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love. Venus has one striking characteristic that the time that Venus appears in our morning and night sky is about 260 days, about the same length as the human gestation period, giving Venus the feminine characteristics.
After the Telescope
Venus was very hard to study before the invention of the telescope. Galileo in 1610 discovered that Venus had phases like the moon from crescents to a full Venus. This is was very shocking to the intellectual community, who still believed that the sun and planets orbited the Earth. To them, Venus was supposed to always have the unilluminated hemisphere face the Earth, so it would always appear to be a crescent in the sky. Cautiously he spread the word to his colleagues through coded letters. Then he publicly announced it to support the Copernican system.
In succeeding centuries, improvements in telescopes yielded little more information about Venus. In 1760's twice a transit occurred. A transit is a rare occurrence when Venus passes directly in front of the sun. During the first transit, in 1761, the Russian astronomer Mikhail Lomonosov, was trying to find the diameter of Venus, because the transit would define the edges of Venus clearly. He found that the diameters of Venus and Earth were almost the same. He couldn't get a very exact measurement of the planet because he found that Venus had a hazy outline and not distinct enough for an accurate measurement. Thus, he discovered Venus' annoying atmosphere that prevented scientists from doing a comprehensive study of the planet.
On the discovery of an atmosphere, the astronomers at that time, who finally believed in Copernican's theory of a heliocentric universe, started to speculate that Venus was just like earth. They thought that the thick cloud cover was made of water and that so, it was a hot, thickly vegetated, swamp-world. After all Venus and Earth were the same size and they couldn't see through the clouds that were supposedly made of water, so speculation ran high. It was popular for the scholars in that era, the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century to believe in the planetary evolution that the planets father out were created first. Therefore Venus was an evolutionary stage earlier than the Earth and Mars was seen as a Earth that had died out. The swamp-world scenario was modeled on the Earth's own Carboniferous era, right before the start of the Jurassic era of Tyrannosaurus Rex. During the Carboniferous era, global warming was very bad and the temperatures were very high and there was an abundance of swamps and inland seas. Svnate Arrhenius, a Nobel prize-winning Swedish chemist wrote in 1918 that Venus was very wet and had a very high humidity. Another theory was that Venus was covered in oil and the clouds were made of oil droplets. The English astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle was the one to propose this view, on the basis of detections of the infared signature of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that would make oil through a series of chemical reactions. American astronomers Fred Whipple and Donald Menzel of Harvard University in 1954 that Venus was covered in oceans full of carbon dioxide, just like soda, because if Venus was just rock covered, all the carbon dioxide would be absorbed by the rock, like they do on Earth, and so carbon dioxide could not be detected in the atmosphere. Still in 1955, Venus was still assumed to have a kinde of Venusian vegetation. Russian astronomer G.A. Tikhoff predicted that Venusian plants that Venusian plants were yellow in color, because they needed to reflect the enormous amout of heat rays.
In the late 1950's a more accurate picture of Venus emerged with the help of new equipment and techniques and international science teams working on the cold war race of getting to space. In 1957, ultraviolet photographs of Venus revealed dim markings on Venus' clouds. By tracking the markins it was found the clouds travel at very high speeds and circled the planet every 4 days, east to west, the opposite direction from winds on earth. 1958, brought the first successful bouncing of radar off of the surface of Venus to find the rate of rotation. By 1964, the astonishing fact that Venus rotated much slower than Earth, actually taking 243 earth-days to make a complete rotation was discovered. Venus also turned the opposite of direction of Earth and most planets. This meant that every Venusian year (224.7 earth-days), the sun rises and stays up until next year! Scientists also began to study the radio waves emanated from Venus. They found that a lot of microwave radiation, which indicated a very hot surface over 600 degrees Fahrenheit. In 1968, the predicted temperature of Venus was 570 degrees Fahrenheit, then later on increased to as high as 900 degrees. By 1962, the first spacecraft mission to Venus, the Mariner 2, was ready to launch and find out what Venus was really like.