Object
The five naked-eye planets and the two that need optics: rise and set times, magnitudes, apparent diameters, oppositions and conjunctions, computed for your sky.
Venus peaks at magnitude -4.8, yet its lead over the Sun melts from 61 minutes to 15 in a single month. In between, the Moon will hide it in broad daylight on the 14th, the equinox falls on the 23rd, and the full Moon of the 26th will rise barely later each evening. The month's programme, computed for Western Europe.
Tonight it rises at 22:44, and it will gain twenty minutes every week. More to the point, its rings are open again: edge-on and all but gone in March 2025, they now stand at 8.9 degrees. Here is the season's timetable up to the 4 October opposition, and what instrument it takes.
Between 21:10 and 21:55, low in the west-south-west, a crescent lit to 11.9 % passes within seven degrees of Venus. It is also the best evening this month to see the dark limb of the Moon lit by the Earth. Here are the two quarter-hours that matter, and the arithmetic of what is doing the lighting.
Tomorrow morning the two planets will fit inside a circle one and a half times the width of the full Moon. They will also be four degrees above the horizon in an already brightening dawn. Here is the honest arithmetic: the hour, the altitude, the azimuth, and why half of you will see nothing.