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?

[Juramike]

Personally, I don't like the wavelength limitations of visible light. Hyperspectal imaging, false color imaging, topgraphical coloration, mineral maps based on diagnostic bands - all these things make comparisons and contrasting of features easier (and pretty!).

But I totally agree with the points above: if you are going to show false color or enhanced images, it is important to put a warning lable that they are false color views. And if you are going to show a set of comparison images of planets, they should be all treated similar. If you strip the atmosphere and clouds off one of the terrestrial planets (like Venus), you need to do it for the other similar planets.

If you are only going to show the upper atmospheric structure of Venus, Earth's also needs to be shown for a comparison (but obviously not using the the same technique). [How are they similar? How are they different? Why?]

I always thought the perfect kids book would show a topographic representation of the terrestrial planets for comparison:
["Gee, without water, Earth still has ocean basins and continents....how come the other worlds don't have this? And what's going on with that ridge going down the Atlantic basin? How come Mars has those deep holes? Why are parts of the Moon so smooth?"]

[tedstryk]

I would say that there is a difference between false color imaging that shows, say, infrared wavelengths, so that the colors contain real information that can't be conveyed in a "true" color image and images that are simply colorized to look "cool." Juramike, I fully agree on the visible light issue. Our eyes evolved for our purposes here on earth, but there is so much to be gained from adding non-visible wavelengths. That is why I really prefer to call , for example, a color-shifted Voyager image G-V-UV color instead of "false" color. It isn't entirely false, in the sense that the colors really do mean something.