Venus surface images Options

[ngunn]

I have a question arising from the recent surface images acquired by the Parker Solar Probe (but best discussed in this section, I think, if anyone has comments). Would a camera with similar specifications to WISPR but located on Earth or in Earth orbit be able in principle to image the night-side surface? It presents quite a large target when suitably placed and I imagine some sort of coronagraph arrangement could be used to exclude light from the sunlit crescent.
EDIT - link reposted here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/p...g-view-of-venus

[JRehling]

The simple answer is, yes, it can be done from Earth, and is, but there is one big problem from Earth that you can avoid in space: The glare of the thin crescent of Venus's dayside. Venus's dayside is just so, so much brighter than the nightside signal that any image suffers from the intrusion of that glare if it exists. Even from space, the dayside glare is a threat to any such image.

This was done first by an amateur, Christophe Pellier. The pros have done some better renditions of it in the meantime.

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/...venuss-surface/

I'm also proud to say that in 2020 I have succeeded in capturing the limb of Venus in this way, but I got at best a hint of surface detail. The constraints from Earth are extraordinary because:

1) It must be done when Venus is a thin crescent.
2) It has to be done when the sky is dark.
corollary: Venus must be low in the sky, causing atmospheric interference to be maximized.
3) Infrared's long wavelengths mean that diffraction limitation of resolution for any given aperture is worse than at visible wavelengths.
4) Because Venus's rotation is quasi-synced to the orbital relationship with Earth, we only see part of Venus – the same part at each opportunity. Maybe 40% of Venus is visible and the rest won't be for a very long time.

These constraints all affect the pros as well as the amateurs. No matter how nice your gear is, every one of those things is still true.

Still, even if it's not that useful for science, I find it exciting that it's even possible and that I was able to image the surface of Venus, however rudimentary the result.