Morning Star

In the clouds, Venus in the eastern sky before sunrise yesterday, appearing higher every morning

from nightskyinfo.com:

"Venus appears dazzling in [the] dawn sky. The planet pokes above the horizon [before] the Sun rises, and is conspicuous in the east during twilight. Shining at magnitude -4.6, it is brighter than any other point of light in the sky, and it gets higher above the horizon every day. Through a telescope, Venus' disk appears 40" across and shows a 25-percent- lit phase.

Venus, the second of the inferior planets, is almost the same size as the Earth, and is the nearest body in the sky apart from the Moon. Until recently we knew practically nothing about the surface of Venus, and there were constant references to "the Planet of Mystery". Indeed, until the radar measures of the 1960s even the rate of rotation of the planet was not known.

It was then found that Venus turns on its axis once every 243 Earth-days, making the planet's day longer than its year! Even more surprising is the fact that the rotation is retrograde. In other words, Venus spins in the opposite direction to the majority of the planets in the solar system.
Link to source: [link to www.nightskyinfo.com] 

telephoto view (with tripod) - you can just barely see that it is not a full circle, but lighted by the sun from the side like a partial moon...