Time: 5:00 AM
Brief
About an hour and a half before Sunrise, Venus is already high enough in the east. During the early summer, we saw it near two star clusters in Taurus: the Pleiades and the Hyades. Both are popular for astronomers, for being visible to the unaided eye, and their appearances that way: the Pleiades often mistaken for the Little Dipper, and the Hyades being a wide V shape. There is another open cluster that Venus sometimes gets as close to as we saw it get to the Hyades, and it is approaching that cluster over the next several days: the Beehive. Shown below, we find that being only 1º 20' from the ecliptic makes the Beehive a regular target for planets such as Venus and Mercury; both have constantly moving orbits on either side of the ecliptic--seen from Earth anyway!
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Detailed
At magnitude 4.0, the Beehive requires a much darker sky to see; with such, the cluster looks more like a smudge. If using binoculars or a low-powered telescope, the Beehive's many, many stars resemble "bees swarming"; in this case, near or around a hive. If the timing is right, the planet can go very close to--if not directly through the center of--the cluster. For this to happen, we need to be in a position looking towards Venus when its orbit puts it in line with the cluster the same time that we see the planet go in front of it. There are times when the orbit is perfectly placed but the planet is still a few--if not several--degrees away; that is the case this time, meaning that Venus and the cluster's closest encounter in a little over a week will have them paired well in a wide-field telescope, yet not showing Venus occulting any bees...er, stars!
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