Taken on 2014-01-07 01:04:59 UTC
Distance to Venus = about 50000 km
Spacecraft is high above South pole.
South pole is at right of image.
Venus is just over 12,000 km in diameter – only 5% smaller than the diameter of the Earth.
The striations in the cloud show that the winds are blowing around the pole. The planet and its winds rotate from East to the West, note that this is “backwards” compared to the rotation of the Earth and every other planet.
Note that the blotches on the image are camera artifacts: these are due to sensitivity variations in the camera, which are corrected for in a calibration procedure (that hasn’t been done yet for these images, since they were only obtained today)
Credit: ESA/MPS/DLR/IDA
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