azmth Venus: the planet in 3D

An interactive Venus with the real day and night line and backwards spin driven by the clock, clouds that circle the planet in about 4 days, 22 places human hardware reached that you can click, and the tracks of the two Vega balloons. Zoom in and the clouds open on the radar map of the ground, leaving a faint layer that keeps circling over it. Replay the whole space age from 1961, or read the catalogue of 34 Venus missions behind the globe, with sourced facts, photos, and the failures too. Free, no signup, no ads.

Nothing operates at Venus today (checked 6 November 2026): JAXA switched Akatsuki off on 18 September 2025. The next visitor is Solar Orbiter, flying past on 24 December 2026.

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azmth is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA, Roscosmos, NPO Lavochkin, ESA, JAXA, ISRO, CNSA, or any other space agency or company named on this page.

Radar mosaic: the C3-MIDR global mosaic from Magellan, USGS Astrogeology and NASA (public domain), with the 3.7 percent of the sphere it missed smoothed over. Brightness is radar backscatter; the shading only marks where the Sun is. A faint computer generated cloud layer, the deck described below, is drawn over it.

Reprocessed: the Magellan height map, GTDR version 2, Ford, Pettengill, Liu and Quigley, USGS Astrogeology (public domain). The relief is at true scale.

False colour: ultraviolet composite of Venus's cloud tops at 365 nm, built by azmth from 39 Akatsuki UVI images taken 15 to 21 October 2018. Each strip is the best view as it crossed the day side, so the map sweeps across five days and shows no single moment. Clouds change within a day, so far-apart parts of the map were never seen together. Above about 70 degrees latitude the orbit sees only grazing views, so the polar caps are smoothed. Processing: Minnaert correction (k = 0.695) with one constant per image, shift into a frame drifting at 72 degrees per day (5 days per circuit), weighting by viewing geometry, three-band blending, zonal-mean fill at the poles. Data: ISAS/JAXA, CC BY 4.0, Murakami et al., Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki UVI Longitude-Latitude Map Data v1.1, doi:10.17597/isas.darts/vco-00016. Modified by azmth.

Computer generated view: the cloud deck and haze, from the same Akatsuki composites (ISAS/JAXA, CC BY 4.0, modified by azmth). The pattern is the ultraviolet map turned down to about 12 percent, the haze a second composite of 40 images from 26 to 30 October 2018, blurred, and the tint comes from measured albedos (Mallama, Krobusek and Pavlov 2017). The clouds move as one shell at about 4 days a circuit (JAXA, 2020); NASA and ISAS also give about 4.5 days, and the pattern in these images takes about 5. The haze slides 1.12 times as fast, a display choice. Over the radar the same deck stays as a faint layer, about 18 percent opaque, moving at the same rate.

Diagram: past orbiter paths from NASA/JPL Horizons (Venus Express, Akatsuki), NAIF SPICE kernels (Magellan) and NASA PDS tables (Pioneer Venus Orbiter), all public domain. Venera 9 and 10 are rebuilt from published elements (NSSDCA), their orientation illustrative; Venera 15 and 16 take their size from NPO Lavochkin and their plane from azmth's fit to the NASA PDS altimeter tracks. Not drawn: Magellan's spent Star 48B rocket motor and a cap released by Pioneer Venus Orbiter, both listed as still in orbit (McDowell, 6 November 2026) with no published position.

Diagram: the Vega balloon tracks, the measured position fixes from Lorenz, Crisp and Huber, Vega 1 and Vega 2 Balloon and Lander Archive, NASA PDS open archive, 2020. The faint end of each track is the 1986 model, which nobody measured.

Diagram: the dots mark published positions from Akim and Stepanyants, via Abdrakhimov 2001; NSSDCA; Pioneer Venus project, PDS; VLBI fix, PDS; Siddiqi 2018, from Soviet ballistics; PDS ephemeris, orbit 5055. Each panel names its own source.

astronomy-engine: Sun and Venus geometry driving the day and night line and the planet's slow turn (MIT). The attitude is the IAU 2015 model and is checked against JPL Horizons.

azmth Venus: the planet in 3D

The mission catalogue

Understanding Venus

Numbers and data

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