What color is Venus the planet?

Throughout the years, every planet has been depicted as a different color to what it truly is. Jupiter is often seen as red, and Saturn is often shown as being purple in comics and magazines. Another planet you’ve probably seen in a range of different colors in Venus, which I’ve seen represented by the colors red, yellow, purple, blue and probably a few others too. But what is the true color of Venus? That’s what we’re going to take a quick look at now.

The color of Venus is yellow with some white mixed in, although when you get up close and personal with the planet, it’s actually covered with some darker red geographical features that are almost Martian colored.

Through a telescope, the planet is so bright that it often just looks like an extremely bright star of a white color. Getting the exact color of a planet right is very difficult for astronomers, as often they need to enhance the pictures that they’ve taken to draw out the features of the planet itself.

This is one of the main reasons why you’ll see Venus is a variety of different colors, as astronomers and scientists often edit the images to make the geographical features, like canyons and volcanoes, easier to see. You can find out some more amazing facts about Venus, or continue learning about the planet’s color here.

But most astronomers agree that to the human eye at least, Venus appears to us in a faint yellow coloring, mixed in with some white where necessary. This is mainly because the atmosphere of the planet is made from carbon dioxide; this, with the sulphuric acid clouds that surround Venus, mean that the planet ends up being this yellowish color.

You may be thinking; why is the answer so unclear? Surely a planet is one color or the other, right? Well, yes, but there are some difficulties knowing the true color of a planet, and there are two main reasons why this is the case.

Firstly, we need to take into account the Sun’s effect on a planet, as it can make it appear a different color than what it is. And secondly, some photos that we have of planets have actually been taken at different wavelengths, so they may not be an accurate representation of the planet’s coloring.

Venus is actually the closest planet to Earth, and for this reason, it’s been one of the most highly explored of any planets – it’s much easier for us to get to Venus than it is to travel all the way out to the Jovian planets. The difficult with Venus, as you’d expect, lies firmly in the temperature of the planet. As it’s much closer to the Sun, it can reach highs of 480°c, which means it’s tough to explore – plus its atmosphere is thick too.

And actually, Venus was the first planet explored by Earth – from a distance of course – all the way back in 1962 with the Mariner 2. This spacecraft was the first to confirm the the high temperature of the planet, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the Soviet Union landed the first spacecraft on its surface.

Since then, many different spacecrafts have flown by the planet, like the Cassini-Huygens mission and the Messenger mission en route to Mercury. The Japanese launched their first successful Spacecraft to Venus, Akatsuki, in 2010, but it wasn’t until 5 years later that it managed to enter the planet’s orbit, where it remains today.

To sum it up, Venus is definitely considered by astronomers to be a yellow and white color, much lighter than some other planets in our solar system. However, there are some features on its surface which appear to be darker than this, with some regions appearing to be a dark red and almost brownish color. Though from a distance to us, it still looks yellow.