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

golden age of astronomy

[peter303]

More and better Earth and Space-based telescopes just keep on coming.
Its appropriate since Galileo took this Dutch novelty exactly four centuries ago and asked "I wonder what I'll see if I look at the night sky?"

I'm looking forward to when various systematic mapping projects put their results into Google Sky and related cloud servers for public access. If you check out the site nmannedspaceflight.com you'll see how amatuers are poring over this kind of data to make important discoveries of near earth objects, internal shadows in Saturns rings, and the like which professionals may have overlooked.

Hershel vs. Hubble

[moon3]

Saying that the blurry ESA's image is showing some unseen features is rather strange. It is an IR image, but still.. Hubble shows amazing detail on M74, and I mean amazing.

Hubble:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071201.html

Hershel:
http://www.esa.int/images/SPIRE250_M66_M74_fig1_H.jpg

Re:Hershel vs. Hubble

[davecl]

Hubble works in the optical at wavelengths more than 100 times smaller than those Herschel is using, so it's not surprising you can see more detail. However, the Herschel images aren't showing stars at all, they're showing cool dust, just 50 or so degrees above absolute zero, material that Hubble just cannot see at all (and to be fair, Herschel can't see the stars that Hubble can see).

Trying to compare Hubble with Herschel is like comparing a fire with a bucket of liquid nitrogen.

Re:Hershel vs. Hubble

[Timothy Brownawell]

Just a quick question. "Herschel can't see the stars that Hubble can see." Is a star DARKER than interstellar dust at these frequencies? Or is it just not bright enough to stand out? (Probably has something to do with black body radiation).

The stars are behind the dust, and the dust basically acts like a color filter. So it's transparent at some frequencies and you can see the stars, and it's opaque at other frequencies and you can't see the stars (but can see the dust).

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...

If you want to help, try Galaxy Zoo

[Cyberax]

There are several community astronomy projects.

You can contribute to http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ - it's easy, doesn't require any prior knowledge and might help us make interesting discoveries.