Venus breaks the rules of planetary timekeeping.

One full spin on its axis takes about 243 Earth days. But one trip around the Sun takes only about 225 Earth days. That means Venus’s rotation day is longer than its year.

It gets stranger: Venus rotates in the opposite direction from most planets. If you could somehow stand on its crushingly hot surface, wrapped in clouds of sulfuric acid, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east.

Because of that backward spin, a sunrise-to-sunrise “solar day” on Venus is about 117 Earth days still wildly long, but not the same as its slow full rotation.

Venus is almost Earth’s size, but its clock runs like it was assembled by a cosmic prankster.

On Venus, the calendar outruns the clock.