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We are constantly developing new ways to process and extract data from raw solar imaging. Much of these efforts are experimental and subjective. This time we've enhanced the atmosphere thickness surrounding Venus during a solar transit when Venus was passing in front of the Sun, and looked for Venusian atmospheric detail across the planet.
Topmost Image: This is the final step 4 in the processing cycle. Here we see Venus moving across the face of the sun, approaching the solar limb. The Sun and Venus final result show the appearance of detail in the atmosphere of the planet and a surrounding atmosphere of varying thickness outwards from Venus. The color shows the differentials.
Immediately Above: Step 2 in image processing will determine if any data is present in the raw image as related to the planet and the surrounding region of atmosphere, and if it warrants continued processing.
Left: This is step 3 in the process after
At left: Step one in the solar-venus process is to acquire a raw image of Venus traveling across the face of the extremely bright sun. At these great and vast luminosity differences, Venus looks like a black featureless disk, i.e. until processing can view the underlying sheath of light differentials. This image is first processed to reduce the effects of Venus' motion and increase the clarity and sharpness of underlying features.
step 2 determines the presence of imagery on Venus and adjacent features, suggesting a surrounding band of thick atmosphere that sunlight is filtering through. The changing solar plane also shows detail closer to the Sun's limb as it receives color encoding to specify the intensity levels of objects discerned. This is also a first level step in reducing the luminosity differential between the Sun and Venus.
