Venus’s southern hemisphere

In this mosaic, infrared images taken at a wavelength of 5 micrometres (in red) are overlaid on ultraviolet images, taken at 0.365 micrometres.

The bright areas in the infrared images represent the temperatures at the cloud tops (dark regions denote lower temperatures). The oval feature that stands out in these images is the giant eye of a hurricane, or the polar vortex, at the planet’s south pole. Its centre is displaced from the south pole and the structure measures about 2000 km across, rotating around the pole in about 2.5 days. The atmosphere rotates anticlockwise in the figure.