Bright spot on Venus Options

[Juramike]

space.com story on mysterious cloud brightening on Venus:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0907...right-spot.html


...also spotted by an amateur astronomer.

[Stu]

Good to hear the Venus Express team is excited by this and "on it". Appreciate you explaining the ins and outs of the observing process, too. Have to be honest tho, seems a bit of a faff about when the Hubble guys can just swing that great star cannon around towards Jupiter, take pics of the wound left by an impacting asteroid and comet and have them out on the web and being drooled over and Twittered around the globe within hours. But fair enough, I think we all realise now that things move rather differently within ESA, and I accept totally that retargetting a probe orbiting a planet is a very different task to retargetting a telescope.

But seriously, if anyone from ESA with influence over these things is reading this, it's really very, very simple: if you'd just find a way to put raws online there's an army of people out here ready, willing and able to work with you on making the most of them. We don't want paid, we don't even want feeding, we'd do it for free, just as we do with MER and CASSINI images. We do it for the challenge, the love of science and the personal satisfaction.