Planck Satellite Releases First Images

davecl writes "The Planck Satellite has released its first images. These are from the 'First Look Survey' and show a strip of the sky scanned at a range of radio and submillimetre wavelengths. The results are already better than what was seen by the previous microwave background satellite, WMAP. More details and images available in English and French. The Planck Mission Blog contains more details of the project and continuing coverage. I maintain the mission blog but even I am impressed with these first images!"

I've been Waiting For This

[BeardedChimp]

I was involved for a while with a project within Manchester university where they were looking to map some of the cmb on the cheap using students/postgrads and a few Professors combined with some off the shelf tech.

To cut down on costs we were going to use the receivers from sky's satellite dishes since theres millions of the things, combined with a form of interference.
My job was supposed to be (until I suddenly was swamped with other responsibilities and had to leave the project) to write the code that would create montecarlo simulations of the project.
Was a while ago since I left I wonder how they have gotten on with it now.

From TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

The detectors are looking for variations in the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background that are about a million times smaller than one degree â" this is comparable to measuring from Earth the body heat of a rabbit sitting on the Moon.

The body heat of a rabbit sitting on the moon? Interesting example.

I wish they'd post a bit of the sky from both...

[Thagg]

I am very curious to see Planck's resolution compared to the W-MAP. Just zoom into a bit of the map, and show them side by side, that's all I ask! They do have some nice zooms of the map on the french-language site, and I suppose if I wasn't so lazy I could find the corresponding sections in the W-MAP output. I know that Planck can detect the polarization of the CMB, I'm just dying to see what that will show us!

I've read several times that while Planck has many times the resolution and sensitivity of the W-MAP probe, there's really no more information to be gained beyond Planck. It will give us almost every bit of information that the cosmic background radiation has for us. It's kind of amazing, really.