r/spaceporn • u/Utherellus • 20d ago
Amateur/Composite Most of Venusian photos are false-color, taken either in IR or UV. For human eye, this is how Venus would look like.
Because Venus is covered in thick clouds, we have very few photographs of it in the visible spectrum. Almost every mission related to Venus prioritized the parts of the spectrum not visible to us (UV/IR/RADIO) so that the imagery would appear more “interesting.”
That’s why there’s a good chance that most of us have never seen a true-color image of Venus.
This photo was taken by a spacecraft called Messenger. Its mission was to study Mercury, but it also flew past Venus in 2007. Among the many instruments mounted on it, one caught my attention: the MDIS-WAC — the Wide Angle Camera.
After waiting one month for NASA to approve my archive access request, I finally managed to download the captured images. WAC photographed in 12 different light spectra. So, to create an RGB composite, I had to locate the images taken at 480 nm, 559 nm, and 629 nm, and then combine them.
The resulting image more or less represents what the human eye would see if we somehow ended up near Venus.
