You need to upgrade your Flash Player The theme of this blog is not only and obviously space, but in particular “terrestrial worlds”, places that tend to have surfaces on which one could walk or at least attach oneself to. These places sometimes also have other earth-like familiar features such as atmospheres, weather, volcanos, geysers and perhaps, we are finding, even exotic oceans, rivers or lakes that are not necessarily made of familiar materials we are used to here at home. The second theme is imagery. Occasionally I do some retouching of images when needed if an image is incomplete or sometimes “dirty” or noisy. I will attempt to correct image shortcomings based upon other images or well-accepted presumed attributes. When this is done, notes will be offered as to what was added, why and sometimes how it was done. This way no one should ever wonder if something they are looking at is real or photoshop.
« Saturn Through the Eyes of Hubble
Saturnati XX »

Something You Never See: Venus in Natural Light

In a way, as boring as Uranus to look at. In another way… fascinating to see a whole world of pure blankness. It seems almost unreal. Like a giant pearl.

According to Gordan Ugarkovic, “This is calibrated color using actual red, green and blue filters. If you were to enhance the contrast you’d see there are white-yellow cloud patterns. The problem with pretty much all images of Venus released so far is that they’ve been enhanced/false color or just colorizations of ultraviolet frames. It’s only once you go to (ultra)violet wavelengths that any cloud bands become readily visible. Human eye just doesn’t cut it here.”

Thanks as usual to for this rare gem.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 12:23 am and is filed under Venus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Something You Never See: Venus in Natural Light”

  1. Gordan Says:
    April 17th, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    My thoughts exactly. I especially find the planet’s limb to look somehow unnatural - there’s no limb brightening and bluish hue due to Rayleigh scattering as visible on Jupiter, Saturn, Earth etc. atmospheres. It’s just white, plain and simple.

    And this is not even a gamma-corrected version!

  2. Lucius Says:
    April 19th, 2009 at 6:39 am

    Is this the real color(s) of Venus? I always thought it had white and yellow clouds… As well, it’s very fascinating: like Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, she stays onto a shell, and the planet is like a pearl… Wonderful!

  3. Gordan Says:
    April 20th, 2009 at 6:02 am

    This is calibrated color using actual red, green and blue filters. If you were to enhance the contrast you’d see there are white-yellow cloud patterns. The problem with pretty much all images of Venus released so far is that they’ve been enhanced/false color or just colorizations of ultraviolet frames. It’s only once you go to (ultra)violet wavelengths that any cloud bands become readily visible. Human eye just doesn’t cut it here.

  4. Gordan Says:
    April 20th, 2009 at 11:40 am

    BTW, here’s an old enhancement I did a while back, showing that image as a difference between the violet and one of the more bland filters:

    http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n15/ugordan/F-C.jpg

Leave a Reply