More First-Light Data From Herschel Space Telescope 21
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."
golden age of astronomy (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [unmannedspaceflight.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.
Re:Hershel vs. Hubble (Score:4, Interesting)
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).