When it comes to the night sky, what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. Consider Venus and Aldebaran, which are low in the east at first light. Venus is the brilliant “morning star.” Aldebaran stands directly below Venus, and shines just one percent as bright. But their apparent brightness is the only way in which Venus outranks Aldebaran.

Venus is a planet in our own solar system – a little smaller and less massive than Earth. It’s so brilliant because it’s close to both Earth and the Sun, and because it’s covered in bright clouds.

Aldebaran, on the other hand, is a true star – and an impressive one at that. It’s heavier than the Sun, about 45 times wider, and more than 400 times brighter.

Compared to that, Venus is a bare speck – a flake of cosmic jetsam. Aldebaran is almost half a million times more massive and 5,000 times wider – so big that you could pack more than a hundred billion Venuses into its great bulk.

So Aldebaran appears fainter than Venus only because of its greater distance – almost four million times farther than the morning star.

Look for this mismatched pair beginning a couple of hours before sunrise the next few mornings. Venus will slide to the lower left, and will stand side by side with Aldebaran on Wednesday. They’ll pull apart after that, with Venus dropping a little lower in the sky day by day, and Aldebaran climbing a little higher.

Script by Damond Benningfield