Marble Venus [JAXA VCO AKATSUKI] (Sergio Díaz)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Marble Venus [JAXA VCO AKATSUKI]

Invisible light is needed to reveal the venusian marble. Here, ultraviolet and infrared data from different flybys of the JAXA's AKATSUKI Venus Climate Orbiter mission have been blended to show intriguing cloud features in day and night sides, respectively.
Such a different view from the featureless crescent we are used to seeing through the telescope, in visible light. Truly an alien world.

Thousands of images were manually reviewed for JAXA's DARTS archive looking for the ones where the size of the planet was big enough to fill the small 1-megapixel sensor of the instruments and the amount of detail on the atmosphere were good enough to start with. I finally settled using data from different flybys, trying to get the best images from the UVI instrument for the dayside, and from the IR2 for the nightside. Preprocessing, alignment and channel mixing were made in PixInsight separately for each instrument, while the composition of the day and night sides was made in Adobe Photoshop. To cope with the lack of resolution of the instruments, the image was upscaled by ensembling several super-resolution machine learning models (PSNR-small, PSNR-large & Noise-cancel from ISR python package, and ESRGAN by Wang, X. et al.), and the output carefully checked for artifacts.

Data time range: September 2016, October 2017
Telescope and Instruments: JAXA AKATSUKI VCO, UVI & IR2
Channels: UVI: 283 nm, 365 nm; IR2: 1.735 μm, 2.26 μm
Data credits: ISAS/JAXA/Sergio Díaz

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