DescentBB

I was wondering if anyone knew a place to get actual photos of a planet's surface, preferably color photos. It's easy to get Mars and the Moon, but other planets are not nearly as cooperative...

Specifically, I'd like to see these planets/moons:
Callisto
Europa
Venus
Mercury
Triton
Charon

If anyone has any data on that, I'd love to see it (although I know some of these for sure have had no surface photos taken).

Isaac wrote:http://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html

Thanks for the thought, but I've already seen that site

I meant something like this, an actual surface shot from the ground, or something close to reliable...

Nothing has ever landed on Callisto, Europa, Triton or Charon. We don't even have any detailed images of Charon (or Pluto for that matter) because the closest probes we sent (Voyager 1/2) were still many millions of miles away - much too far to see anything. When the New Horizons probe gets there in about 5 years or so that will change, but I don't recall a landing being planned.

There was at least one probe that landed on Venus, but I don't know whether it got any decent photos (I recall some story about the lens cap melting onto the camera because of how acidic, and hot, the atmosphere was). Mercury, I'm not sure whether there's been a landing or just orbital stuff. Nevertheless I don't recall any particularly recent visits to either, hence why it might be difficult to track them down.

I do get the feeling from what you say that I'm just telling you things you already know, though.

try http://www.solarviews.com/cap/index/index.html

There are the original and enhanced versions of the Venus surface here:
http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm

And here are some from the Titan (not Triton) surface lander:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/titan_images.html

The rest have never had a lander.

How about here:

http://www.nasaimages.org/

Thanks everyone for your replies. Then I will go for a secondary option: how would these environments look?

Example: this image was constructed from radar data from Venus:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... p39146.png

Would you call this reliable, or would the coloring be pretty far off from this?

Also, would taking pictures from far up be reliable for some planets? For instance, would the surface of callisto contain these colors:
http://www.cosmiclight.com/imagegalleri ... asgard.jpg

Venus I know is covered with clouds, but Callisto would just have stars and Jupiter in the background, right?

Also, Europa looks like this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... a-moon.jpg

But artist mockups often have Europa covered with ice. Also, with two different mockups, one has Europa with just stars and Jupiter in it's sky, but another has a blue sky due to the atmosphere. Which one would be a better interpretation?
http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/Images ... b22_sm.jpg
http://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/images/Europa_Surface.jpg

In case your wondering, I'm creating a mod, and these planets are the main settings...