I've looked at those photos of Venus probably a thousand times. Still, every time I come across them I just stare at them thinking, over and over again, "This photo is from another planet. In space." Followed quickly by "Oh man, we're also floating in space" and then reassuring myself that gravity is doing it's job and we're not going to float away and we're pretty well stuck to the sun. Crisis averted.
I'm in no way a conspiracy theoirst wrt. space exploration, but a follow-up question popped to my mind immediately: those pictures are so Earth-like that how do we know they were made on Venus?
(I assume there was a way for the global scientific community to independently verify that this data indeed came from space)
The latest Mars expedition did gave us quite detailed video of the landing. I thought that maybe they have videos of the whole trip across space, even in crude low res. form.
