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Herschel all sky viewer

Over the last few days I have been working on an all sky viewer for the Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP). The easiest way to view it is to look at it through the dedicated viewer here:

http://hedam.lam.fr/HELP/dataproducts/dmu31/dmu31_HiPS/viewer/

There you can click on objects in the HELP ‘A list’ and see their spectral energy distributions and have links to the full measurements from the Virtual Observatory at susseX (VOX). I’ll write some more about that another day. You can also view the individual elements using Aladin Desktop. Details of how to do so are here.

I think we can improve this site so please let me know any issues you have with it. It would be good to optimise it and work on viewing though a phone. You can also embed the viewer in websites such as below:

It is a great way to easily visualise all the data we have made over the last few years and we will continue to develop it with new datasets as we make them.

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Herschel ten years after launch

Over the last two days I have been attending a celebration of the ten year anniversary (1512h 14 May 2008) of the the launch of the Herschel space observatory. It has been a pleasure to visiting the European Space Astronomy Centre just outside Madrid. The centre is dotted with numerous models of European Space Agency telescopes.

I gave a short talk on the Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP) that I have been working on for the last few years. You can download the talk here. you can also see a full video of all the talks (my talk starts at 2:19:33):

Herschel was launched together with Planck. There is still an ongoing connection between the two instruments and it was fascinating to see the engineering behind launching two satellites together.

It was inspiring to see the great range of science that was done with the instrument. I have to admit I knew very little about the aspects outside my own field of extragalactic astronomy (extraextragalactic?). The whole enterprise has been ongoing for around thirty years and clearly occupied the large part of a number of people’s careers. It is testament o their hard work that the data is still leading to new scientific results.