Before you start

1. Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth is.
2. Venus is roughly the same size as Earth.
3. Venus is cloudy all the time and everywhere.The only gaps are the eyes of the vortices above the poles.
4. Surface temperature on Venus: 464 °C(The hottest kitchen oven reaches about 220 °C.)It is even hotter in the deeper basins.It is cooler on the high mountains.It is about the same at the poles and at the equator, by night and by day.A faint red glow becomes visible to the eye at 525 °C.
5. Air pressure at the surface: 92 atmospheres.This equals the pressure 900 m under water.
6. Air density at the surface: 65 kg/m³.This lies between the density of air on Earth (1.3 kg/m³) and that of water (1000 kg/m³).
7. Data for a future calendar of Venus:A solar day (from noon to noon) on Venus lasts 117 Earth days.One rotation around its axis takes 243 Earth days.One year (one orbit around the Sun) lasts 225 Earth days.The upper atmosphere and its cloud layer go around the planet in about 4 Earth days.
8. The Sun rises in the west and sets in the east.The disc of the Sun cannot be seen from the surface because of the clouds.
9. The last photograph of the surface of Venus was taken by the Soviet Venera 14 lander on 5 March 1982. The lander worked for 57 minutes in all.

About the images

Every image shows a coordinate grid at 1° intervals. One degree of latitude is 105.6 km long everywhere. One image covers an area about the size of Transdanubia, western Hungary. Longitudes on Venus run from 0° to 360° east. Feature names follow the IAU standard and are given in Latin.

The radar maps with the 1° grid were made by NASA's Magellan spacecraft between 1990 and 1992. They are mosaics of left-looking SAR radar images, all at a resolution of 75 m per pixel. The radar mosaics are in Mercator projection.

The images on the Early mapping of Venus page were taken with radio telescopes on Earth.