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

[rlorenz]

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?

Eliot Young has obtained some very good results with the IRTF telescope (spectral image cubes, in fact, which I dare say is rather labor-intensive to process) Not sure if there is anything published on it yet tho

And there are even a few credible amateur examples. I think it would be a very good project for a university observatory with a telescope in the 14-30 inch class. A Lyot mask or similar to exclude the dayside crescent would help a lot. IIRC when Hansell and Hunten used the Arizona 61-inch to search for lightning with a (for the time) fast CCD, they had a custom mask made for each day of observation, since the geometry was slightly different