Range This image of the planet Venus was taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft.

Range : 1 million miles (1.63 million km) This image of the planet Venus was taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft shortly befor 10pm PST when the space craft was directly above Venus' equator. This is the 66th of more than 80 Venus images Galileo was programmed to take and record during its Venus flyby. In the picture, cloud features as small as 25 miles (40 km) can be seen. Patches of waves and convective clouds are superimpposed on the swirl of the planet's broad weather patterns, marked by the dark chevron at the center. North is at the top. The several ring-shaped shadows are blemishes, not planetary features. The spacecraft imaging system has a 1500-mm, f/8.5 reflecting telescope; the exposure time was 1/40 second. The image was taken through the violet filter (0.41 micron.). It was produced by the imaging system in digital form, as a set of numbers representing the brightness perceived in each of the 640,000 picture elements defined on the solid-state plate, called a charged-coupled-device or CCD, on which the image was focused.