Yesterday was a busy one for the Milky Way Project, and for the Zooniverse. A BBC News story drove tens of thousands of visitors to the site in just a few hours. The story featured a beautiful image of RCW 120, a bubble (above) that has been described as ‘nearly perfect’ by Matthew Povich on our science team.
The story also seems to have captured the attention of Chris North at Cardiff University, who is the UK’s Herschel Outreach Officer. One of the Herschel space telescope’s first image releases was of this exact region and Chris put up a post yesterday showing how the Spitzer and Herschel views of this beautiful bubble compare.
Herschel has a bigger mirror than Spitzer and sees longer wavelengths (and thus colder material). The two observatories’ images complement each other very well. Spitzer shows fine-grained detail and structure in the ring’s edge, Herschel shows the extent of the cold dust that makes up the bulk of the region. Chris explains a bit more in his blog post about this composite image. These two observatories will no doubt be used together many times in the years to come. Spitzer’s main period of observations is over, but Herschel still has coolant and lots of planned observing time left to go.
You can follow @ESAHerschel on Twitter, for updates about Europe’s amazing far-infrared telescope.
The Milky Way Project Blog 