The Mysterious Streaks in the Clouds of Venus. Clues to Life or Strange Cosmic Chemistry?

To be read in conjunction with the tangent section of the astrophiz podcast #243 https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/astrophiz-243-october-sky-guide-saturn-opposition-orionids-venus This month as Venus swells in size and becomes a wire thin crescent, visible even in binoculars (although best seen at twilight as its brightness may cause reflection artifacts), let us reflect on its reflective atmosphere.Seen through ordinary binoculars and telescopes, Venus is plain (almost blindingly) white and featureless, its surface eternally cloaked in clouds. But if you put a (swingingly expensive) UV filter on your telescope, you can see structures in the clouds, dramatic dark and bright patterns moving with the planet's sulfuric acid clouds. Venus in false colour from the Akatsuki UVI instrumenthttps://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-view-of-Venus-in-ultraviolet-from-Akatsuki-May-2016-A-false-color-image-using_fig3_356985876Astronomers have known about these bands for around a century, yet the…