Editor's note: This blog post is a collaboration between an image processing enthusiast (Damia Bouic) and three professional scientists (Thomas Widemann, Emmanuel Marcq, and Colin Wilson). Bouic has dived into a data set and processed images, and Widemann, Marcq, and Wilson have interpreted them. In the blog post below, the scientists' words are set off in block quotes preceded by "WMW"; the rest of the text and all the images are Damia's work. --ESL

Akatsuki (also known as PLANET-C and Venus Climate Orbiter) is a Japanese mission that launched almost eight years ago, in 2010. It missed its first attempt to orbit Venus on December 7, 2010 due to the failure of its orbital insertion rocket. It was only on December 7, 2015, after several years of wandering around the Sun, that Akatsuki succeeded in placing itself in orbit around the enigmatic planet. Even though the new orbit of Akatsuki is distant and highly elongated, a large portion of the original science objectives may still be achieved.

That's Akatsuki's story. I was not very interested in this mission until one day when curiosity took me to its website, where I found the archival images from the mission. I thought it might be nice to try to process some images, just to see what happened. I am not disappointed with the result, which I present to you below.