The first image from the surface of another Planet, that of Venus returned from the Venera 9 lander on October 22 1975. 244K

  The second photograph returned from Venus, by Venera 10, on Oct 25 1975. Both landers carried lights anticipating a darker scene than they found. The lights add illumination to the left and right of the views. 680K

On March 1 1982 Venera 13 landed on a surface resembling that seen by Venera 10. The camera systems were improved over the earlier successful landers (Veneras 11 and 12 carried cameras but a 'lens cap' malfunction prevented the use of the cameras!) and obtained color information with repeated scans of the tilted panoramic camera using color filters. 1.1MB

Venera 14 landed on Venus on March 5 1982, seeing a weathering layered surface, possibly volcanic in origin. Each lander carried a spring powered arm to test the 'give' of the surface materials, unfortunately in this case the ejected camera cover just happened to fall right where the probe would strike the ground! 1.3MB

 The later Venera 13 and 14 landers returned crude color images. This Russian color photo suffers from moderate reflections over the glass, but shows partial color pans returned from the cameras of both spacecraft opposite to the generally released color views. The Venera 14 full panorama is shown, with some color differences between layers visible. 924K A lesser quality Venera 13 color image is here. Don P. Mitchell has obtained and processed the original spacecraft data, resulting in much cleaner images. His Soviet Venus images page can be seen here.

This perspective grid attempts to project the Venera surface panoramas to a flat surface. This was used to prepare views of the Venusian surface from different perspectives than the original camera viewpoint, such as the example below. © Don Davis 148 K

This airbrush painting was made as an attempt to rework the perspective of the views of Venus provided by Venera 14. Artwork Copyright © Don Davis 64K