The cameras scanned the scene one pixel at a time, and their lifetime on the surface was short. Given these limits, there were several options. One would have been to image a very narrow area at high resolution from the lander base to the horizon, but that would have been hard to interpret. Scanning from surface to horizon over a large area would have produced an image with such coarse resolution that again, it would have had limited value. They compromised: the camera would scan in a U-shape, meaning that the tips of the panorama would look at the horizon, while the middle would look down at the base of the lander.

For science, this worked well. Visually, however, they are unnatural. Of course, these panoramas can be rectified to show the surface at a more natural angle. Still, this leaves the center, the focal area of the images, as a gaping hole, and is thus visually unsatisfying. In the past, I tried to make views out of corrected corners of the images, but these proved too small to do much with and were still very awkward. After seeing Don Mitchell's excellent work on Venera 13 and 14 data, I got the idea of creating an image for both landers created by sampling each image at different distances from the lander to create a "proper" picture. The objects in the image would be real, though the arrangement would not. However, given that the original images are only 128x512 pixels (and not all of that shows the surface), making this convincing was very difficult (Venera 13 and 14 took panoramas on both sides of the lander and at much higher resolution, allowing much more image data to sample). The first attempt was a failure.



I recently tried again. This time, I accepted the fact that, in the case of Venera 9, I would have to use somewhat distorted versions of the same rocks at times to make a sufficiently big image. I still don't love the result, but given the limited data and the complexity of the landscape, it is the best I've been able to do. The fact that the illumination is clearly different on the left-hand side and the right hand side of the panorama exacerbates the problems. Still, it makes for a neat view.