More First-Light Data From Herschel Space Telescope

davecl writes "First-light images and spectra have now been released for all three of the instruments on Herschel. (The first images came out a couple of weeks back.) The news is covered on the BBC, on the ESA website, on the Herschel mission blog, and elsewhere. The data all looks fantastic, and is especially impressive since the satellite was only launched about 7 weeks ago. I work on the SPIRE instrument and help maintain the blog; but even I am astounded by the amount of information in the SPIRE images."

Comments

Re:Hershel vs. Hubble

[True Grit]

since the instruments (Hubble and Hershel) gather 2 different types of information, are the respective scientific teams going to overlay Hubble/Hershel data and extrapolate the differences?

What a lot of people don't know is that many of those colorized images released by NASA for example, are in fact overlays using data from Hubble *and* other instruments providing data from the rest of the frequency spectrum outside of the optical band.

In the press these images are just attributed to Hubble, because a lot of people know about Hubble but not the other ones, such as the infra-red Spitzer Space Telescope, and because they don't have to explain the part about it being a computer-generated combination of data from multiple sources, instead they just say its "a picture from Hubble".

The point many miss is that Hubble is almost *blind* to a *majority* of the Universe. Much of what we know about the Universe comes from observing the infra-red and radio frequencies, not the optical frequencies.

So to answer your question, yes, they've been combining data from multiple sources all along, but the media, in their never-ending quest to dumb us all down, have just been leaving out a few details. Shocking, I know...