Global True Color View Of Venus? Options

[elakdawalla]

I'm creating a website with views of the worlds of the solar system, to scale with each other (it'll march up and down the few orders of magnitude necessary), and I am having a terrible time finding a global view of Venus to include in it that fits the criteria I'm trying to apply. To the extent possible, I am searching for:

- Full-disk, global view
- Minimum phase angle available
- Approximate true color, as would be perceived by a human observing the globe from space

For Venus, the only global views I am finding are either based on Magellan data (radar views, nothing like what a human would see) or are colorized ultraviolet views (which greatly overemphasize the visibility of cloud patterns in the Venusian atmosphere). I've seen the lovely partial global view of Venus on Don Mitchell's website -- that's the sort of thing I'm looking for, but I need a full disk. Does anybody have any suggestions? Anybody done any work with Mariner 10 or Galileo data that produces a nice, realistic view?

[Stu]

The problem I encounter is that editors want to use a garish false colour pic without explaining that it IS false colour, which would obviously lead to young readers being led to believe that Saturn really is decorated with poster paint blue, red and green clouds. I once had to fight - not literally! - with an editor to have a false colour view of Victoria Crater (you know, one of the "everything looks blue" images) removed and replaced with a natural colour one, because they wouldn't give me room to explain the nature of the pic. That would have meant a big header saying "Mars - the Red Planet" with a picture of a kingfisher-blue cliff face beneath it...

[tedstryk]

I agree, but I still think that showing the Venusian surface as it would appear in the light that filters through the atmosphere much less "deceptive" than the examples you use, especially when the image is a radar image, so it isn't going to be visually realistic no matter how you portray it.