The Color of Venus
Most pictures you have seen of Venus are in false color. This means that some spacecraft took photos of Venus using a different wavelength of light to show features in its atmosphere. If you could actually get up close and look at Venus with your own eyes, the planet would look bright white, or yellowish, with no features in the clouds.
And this is why the spacecraft image Venus with different wavelengths of light. Once you look at Venus with ultraviolet light, you can see some of the different structures in the clouds that surround Venus.
If you could actually fly down to the surface of Venus, you would just see endless expanses of brown rocks. These are the images sent back to Earth by the Russian Venera spacecraft. Because of the thick clouds on Venus, very little light makes it all the way down to the surface, so everything would look dim and tinted with red.
Some of the bright orange and yellow pictures that you see of Venus are actually false color images. They were taken in a different wavelength of light, such as ultraviolet, and then artificially colored on computer to reveal features.
But seen with your own eyes, the color of Venus is just bright white and featureless.
Filed under: Astronomy
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