They have "explanations" for everything. But we can clearly see that the physical geometry of the scene makes midnight viewing impossible.

The Space.com link self admits that seeing Venus in the middle of the night should be impossible, and provides some sort of convoluted "explanation" without illustration.

Quote from: Space.com

Venus's nightly view

Some astronomy guidebooks will tell you that because Venus is a so-called "inferior" planet — a world  that is closer to the sun than Earth — that you can never see it in the middle of the night. But this week, for many locations, Venus will be visible at the witching hour and for some localities well beyond the stroke of midnight!

The reason that this is possible is two-fold:

First, although Venus has started its march back toward the sun's vicinity, this process initially is rather slow. Indeed, this week Venus' elongation from the sun measures 44 degrees; just 2 degrees shy of its greatest elongation that it attained about three weeks ago. (Your closed fist held at arm's length covers about 10 degrees of the sky).

In the interim, Venus has been progressing eastward along the ecliptic and in the process also moving northward through that part of the sky that the sun itself will be traversing during May and June. In other words, Venus has been describing a high arc across the sky, which is why at sunset it appears from mid-northern latitudes to be nearly halfway from the horizon to the point directly overhead (the zenith).

This explanation is not clear. It is supposed to describe something that is impossible.

I found an image from the New Jersey Institute of Technology which illustrates, with a top-down view, the idea of Venus being at or near "the greatest elongation from the sun," as Space.com tries to use as an explanation.



How does this image or concept allow us to see Venus at night, all throughout the night?