2024-07-18
Luigi Morrone from Italy, reports on the presence of the Venus cloud discontinuity in an early observation of Venus in the current Venus apparition. The cloud discontinuity is a recurrent large-scale wave observed to propagate during decades at the deeper clouds of Venus (47–56 km above the surface) and observable on near infrared wavelengths from 700-900 nm. The feature was first identify on Venus observations acquired by the Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft, but it has been the subject of several studies run with amateur observations. The feature circulates around the atmosphere with a period of about 5 days and has been observed once over more than 100 days in succesive rotations of the planets.
Observations of the Venus cloud discontinuity in this apparition can constrain the mechanisms that control the onset, evolution and behavior of this large-scale wave. The current apparition discovere on this early stage will allow to replicate and possibly improve over previous studies based on amateur data acquired during the 2019/2020 eastern elongation.
Please report your Venus observations of this cloud discontinuity to Dr. Javier Peralta (email: See the plot on the right for information on Venus observations conditions over 2024-2025. The star marks the date of the early observation by Luigi Morrone.