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I was wallowing in the latest Herschel images and it struck me that there was something familiar about them - in the swirls and colours.J M W Turner? I don't know. Perhaps my imagination has run wild.
A Hi-GAL image looking towards the inner galaxy in the Eagle constellation. Centre and left are two massive star-forming regions
It does bring to mind, however, some research presented in 2005 that looked at the way Hubble images were prepared, and the influences of those who did the colouring.
Dr Elizabeth A. Kessler suggested Hubble pictures had the look of romantic 19th Century landscape paintings. Being something of a cultural desert, I can't speak to the aesthetics of Herschel's images, but I can appreciate the stunning science in them.
It will be the observatory's first birthday next week and astronomers from across Europe, and from across the world, have been in Holland this week to assess the first research results. This is why we have the latest - and very welcome - release.
Herschel as you probably know by now goes after the "cold cosmos". Unlike Hubble, which is tuned to see the Universe in the same light that is visible to our eyes, the European observatory is sensitive to much longer wavelength radiation - in the far-infrared and sub-millimetre range.
This means it can detect the emission coming from really frigid stuff, less than 40 kelvin (minus 233 Celsius).
The first two images on this posting come from a Herschel project called the "HiGAL" survey, which has been looking inwards along the plane of our galaxy at the store of material available for star production.
Already, it's showing us how great filaments of gas and dust fragment into the tight knots that eventually produce stars.
You can best see that filamentary structure in the top right-hand corner of the image just below, although at the resolutions we're able to show it's perhaps not that easy.
A Hi-GAL image showing filaments of gas and dust fragmenting to form knots of starbirth
By far the biggest survey on Herschel, however, is a project called Atlas. Unlike Hi-GAL its main focus is outside our Milky Way Galaxy.
It's trying to assess how rates of star formation have changed through cosmic time, and hopefully explain why.To do this, it's mapping galaxies. Huge numbers of them.In the image below, the dots are galaxies. There are 6,000 in there.
Some are quite close; others are billions of light-years away.
Our own galaxy is a pretty sedate place these days. It makes a new star or two every year, but look back three billion years into the past (ie look deeper into the Universe) and you'll see galaxies that make stars a hundred times that rate.
Thousands of galaxies pictured in an Atlas image. Some galaxies are close by to our own, some are 12 billion light-years distant
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
The images above are made using two of Herschel's instruments - Pacs and Spire. The telescope's third instrument is called HiFi. It's a spectrograph. It doesn't produce pretty pictures, just wiggly lines of data that are a much tougher PR sell.
That's a shame because HiFi is also returning some exceptional science.
It's the instrument that can fingerprint all the chemical elements and molecules swirling around in those Turner-like clouds of gas and dust pictured above.
It tells you what state these species are in as well.
One of its key marker molecules is water, and it's recently been watching water ions - water molecules that have lost electrons - in stellar nurseries. It's the intense ultraviolet light from hot young stars that's caused the water to become electrically charged.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
A colossal star many times the mass of our own Sun is seen growing in a bubble of excited gas
If you haven't seen the final image here yet, I've written more extensively about it on the news pages. And if you want to read more about Herschel's best pictures, I recommend the Online Showcase of Herschel Images.
It's where the very best Herschel images over the next two and a half years will be accessible. You can also download various sizes. Nice if you fancy cosmic wallpaper.
This article is from the BBC News website. ? British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
A Hi-GAL image looking towards the inner galaxy in the Eagle constellation. Centre and left are two massive star-forming regions
It does bring to mind, however, some research presented in 2005 that looked at the way Hubble images were prepared, and the influences of those who did the colouring.
Dr Elizabeth A. Kessler suggested Hubble pictures had the look of romantic 19th Century landscape paintings. Being something of a cultural desert, I can't speak to the aesthetics of Herschel's images, but I can appreciate the stunning science in them.
It will be the observatory's first birthday next week and astronomers from across Europe, and from across the world, have been in Holland this week to assess the first research results. This is why we have the latest - and very welcome - release.
Herschel as you probably know by now goes after the "cold cosmos". Unlike Hubble, which is tuned to see the Universe in the same light that is visible to our eyes, the European observatory is sensitive to much longer wavelength radiation - in the far-infrared and sub-millimetre range.
This means it can detect the emission coming from really frigid stuff, less than 40 kelvin (minus 233 Celsius).
The first two images on this posting come from a Herschel project called the "HiGAL" survey, which has been looking inwards along the plane of our galaxy at the store of material available for star production.
Already, it's showing us how great filaments of gas and dust fragment into the tight knots that eventually produce stars.
You can best see that filamentary structure in the top right-hand corner of the image just below, although at the resolutions we're able to show it's perhaps not that easy.
A Hi-GAL image showing filaments of gas and dust fragmenting to form knots of starbirth
By far the biggest survey on Herschel, however, is a project called Atlas. Unlike Hi-GAL its main focus is outside our Milky Way Galaxy.
It's trying to assess how rates of star formation have changed through cosmic time, and hopefully explain why.To do this, it's mapping galaxies. Huge numbers of them.In the image below, the dots are galaxies. There are 6,000 in there.
Some are quite close; others are billions of light-years away.
Our own galaxy is a pretty sedate place these days. It makes a new star or two every year, but look back three billion years into the past (ie look deeper into the Universe) and you'll see galaxies that make stars a hundred times that rate.
Thousands of galaxies pictured in an Atlas image. Some galaxies are close by to our own, some are 12 billion light-years distant
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
The images above are made using two of Herschel's instruments - Pacs and Spire. The telescope's third instrument is called HiFi. It's a spectrograph. It doesn't produce pretty pictures, just wiggly lines of data that are a much tougher PR sell.
That's a shame because HiFi is also returning some exceptional science.
It's the instrument that can fingerprint all the chemical elements and molecules swirling around in those Turner-like clouds of gas and dust pictured above.
It tells you what state these species are in as well.
One of its key marker molecules is water, and it's recently been watching water ions - water molecules that have lost electrons - in stellar nurseries. It's the intense ultraviolet light from hot young stars that's caused the water to become electrically charged.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
A colossal star many times the mass of our own Sun is seen growing in a bubble of excited gas
If you haven't seen the final image here yet, I've written more extensively about it on the news pages. And if you want to read more about Herschel's best pictures, I recommend the Online Showcase of Herschel Images.
It's where the very best Herschel images over the next two and a half years will be accessible. You can also download various sizes. Nice if you fancy cosmic wallpaper.
This article is from the BBC News website. ? British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.