On Venus, the Sun rises in which direction?

On Venus, the Sun rises in the west. Venus rotates in the opposite direction from most planets, so its apparent daily motion carries the Sun from west to east across the sky; in ordinary terms, sunrise is in the west and sunset is in the east.

This unusual behavior is called retrograde rotation. Venus turns once on its axis in about 243 Earth days, and that rotation is opposite to its orbital motion around the Sun. Its solar day—the interval from one sunrise to the next—is about 117 Earth days because the planet is rotating while also moving along its orbit.

The direction is easy to confuse with Venus’s year. Venus orbits the Sun in about 225 Earth days, but it rotates so slowly and unusually that one solar day lasts roughly half a Venusian year. Scientists continue to study how tidal effects and ancient collisions may have contributed to Venus’s distinctive rotation.