On 24 July 2011, something rather magical appeared in the cloud-tops of our nearest planetary neighbour, Venus.

The Venusian atmosphere is thick and choking. A runaway greenhouse effect means that the air is ninety-six percent carbon dioxide, and pressure at the surface is more than ninety-two times that of Earth. It’s by far the hottest planet in the solar system.

But at the top of the dense blanket of clouds, seventy kilometres above Venus’s fiery surface, things are rather calmer. Temperatures are close to those on Earth and there’s even talk of setting up balloon colonies.

Brocken Inaglory // CC BY-SA 3.0

If we did send floating colonies to Venus, their shadows below would be ringed by a concentric rainbow circle known as a glory. These occur on Earth when sunlight shines on a cloud comprised of uniformly-sized, spherical droplets. We often see them from airplanes, or during foggy dawns and dusks, as they require the Sun to be positioned behind you.

Now, however, we’ve observed them on other planets too. The European Space Agency’s Venus Express orbiter has snapped a photo of a 1200 kilometre wide glory on top of the Venusian clouds. Here it is in all its… er… glory: