Anomalous bright spot on the night side of Venus

[Paul G. Abel]

Hi all,

On the 18th April, Anthony Wesley and Philip Miles imaged an anomoloas bright spot and linear feature on the night side of Venus, you can see their observation here: http://www.acquerra.au/astro/gallery/venus/index.live?dir=/venus&image=20250418-193800

In their IR image it looks like there is a bright hot spot in the far north and the associated streak seems to be trailing the bright spot. In the image (which has north up) the spot will be slowly moving towards the terminator and one possible explanation might be that this is an eruptive event of some sort for which the linear feature may be hot gasses associated with it.

Obviously we require more observations as soon as possible to see how the spot evolves over the coming days- the window to image the nightside of Venus is rapidly closing so observations are urgently required. Can I please ask all those with IR imaging equipment to image the night side of the planet as soon as possible and send me your observations as quickly as you can?

I would like to thank Anthony and Phil for contacting me about this and commincating their observations in a timely fashion.

Best wishes,
-Paul

[Robin Leadbeater]

If it is gas from an eruption it will be interesting to see if it turns into a dark (absorption) feature in UV images once it reaches the sunlit area

Robin

[Martin Lewis]

Hi Paul,
Unfortunately, as you know this is a really poor morning apparition for Northern hemisphere imagers of Venus coming after the excellent evening apparition in February. I think all the decent images are going probably going to come from Wesley and Miles, who seem to be having a very good run. Having said that, the day after that image was taken I believe they were cloud affected

Bright streaks are commonly seen in night-side images taken with large aperture scopes in good condition but this is one of brightest that has been imaged and the fact there is a bright spot within the streak makes it particularly intruiging.

For anyone interested in imaging the night-side of Venus there is a disucssion forum which exists to promote the imaging of Venus and the night-side in particular at: https://groups.io/g/VenusImaging

Martin

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