Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is this stunning image of a section of the Galaxy as seen at far-infrared wavelengths. The high-resolution parts come from the recently launched Planck satellite, the rest from the older infrared satellite IRAS. The bright material shown in the image is very cold gas and dust, whose radiation peaks at these long infrared wavelengths.
Image: ESA, Planck HFI Consortium, IRAS
It’s interesting to compare this with the IRAS image:
http://tinyurl.com/yadmwm7
and then to drool over the thought of the vastly more detailed all-sky data that will soon be available from WISE!