Today the European Space Agency released the first image from the Planck mission; around $800 million in funding to detect the leftover microwave radiation from the beginnings of the universe. The image is from multi-frequency data, covering the electromagnetic spectrum of all the sky from 30 GHz to 857 GHz. Another way of putting it; showing emissions from dust in our own galaxy and faint ripples of the cosmic microwave background that is light left behind from the beginning of time. From ESA’s site:
To the right of the main image, below the plane of the Galaxy, is a large cloud of gas in our Galaxy. The obvious arc of light surrounding it is Barnard’s Loop – the expanding bubble of an exploded star. Planck has seen whole other galaxies. The great spiral galaxy in Andromeda, 2.2 million light-years from Earth, appears as a sliver of microwave light, released by the coldest dust in its giant body. Other, more distant, galaxies with supermassive black holes appear as single points of microwaves dotting the image.
What a wondrous universe we live in; vast, complex and wide.