Venus’ southern hemisphere in the ultraviolet

This is a false-colour image taken with the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board ESA’s Venus Express. It shows the full view of the southern hemisphere from equator (right) to the pole. The south pole is surrounded by a dark oval feature. Moving to the right, away from the pole and towards the equator, we see streaky clouds, a bright mid-latitude band and mottled clouds in the convective sub-solar region.

This image was taken in the ultraviolet at 365 nanometres on 23 July 2007 as Venus Express was 35 000 km from the surface of the planet.