Staff Editor
If you were aboard your space yacht, cruising past the day side of Venus, this is exactly what you would see from the viewport window. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe recently beamed back some serious snapshots.
Venus in all her glory
Just like the famous Botticelli painting of the Roman goddess of love, the one which some folks call “Venus on the half-shell,” the beautiful morning star has been captured in all her magnificent glory.
NASA’s impressive Parker Solar Probe “has successfully captured its first images of the surface of Venus from space in the visible spectrum.” She’s gorgeous.
In the image that we see, the planet is covered in thick colorful clouds. It’s rare to get even a glimpse of moody Venus without her veil of turbulent weather.
Parker peeped through a window in the clouds during two separate flybys. Both times, the probe “used its Wide-Field Imager to image the entire night-side in wavelengths of the visible spectrum and extended it into the near-infrared.”
While it’s obvious that “clouds block most of the visible light” bouncing off the surface skin of Venus, they don’t stop other frequencies of light. “The very longest visible wavelengths, which border the near-infrared wavelengths, make it through.”
While spiraling around it’s Venusian orbit, “WISPR managed to pick up a range of wavelengths from 470 nanometers to 800 nanometers, with some of that light being the near-infrared that cannot be seen by the human eye.”
Third brightest light
The light from Venus, which bathes Mother Terra in photons, is only outshone by the light of Sol and Luna. She’s the third brightest thing in the sky which makes her really visible. Even with the naked eye.
Even so, researcher Brian Wood explains, “until recently we have not had much information on what the surface looked like because our view of it is blocked by a thick atmosphere.”
He’s thrilled. “Now, we finally are seeing the surface in visible wavelengths for the first time from space.”
Her cloudy clothes have been ripped off and astronomers are getting an eyeful of Venus in the raw. You can thank the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC for sponsoring his work.
NASA also produced a video of the Parker probe which reveals “a faint glow from the surface that shows distinctive features like continental regions, plains, and plateaus. A luminescent halo of oxygen in the atmosphere can also be seen surrounding the planet.”
Parker “continues to outperform our expectations, and we are excited that these novel observations taken during our gravity assist maneuver can help advance Venus research in unexpected ways.“
