On February 5, 1974, NASA’s Mariner 10 returned this surprising image of Venus. The photograph was the first to record our neighboring planet’s clouds in such detail, polar vortex and all.
On February 5, 1974, NASA's Mariner 10 returned this surprising image of Venus. The photograph was the first to record our neighboring planet's clouds in such detail, polar vortex and all.
NASA isn't above a little bit of image manipulation, though. In real color, Venus looks like this:
To generate the sharp, contrasty visage, Mariner's UV camera filter blocked some of the haze reflected by high level clouds, while NASA "color-enhanced" the final image.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Alex Wild is Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books and media outlets. Follow Alex Wild on Twitter
