What would be really neat is an ATV downlink on UHF so we could watch it. I've always wanted to see the transition where the blue sky disappears.

Check out Cosmocam's YouTube feed. It's a project of the CSBF to allow people (mostly students) to interact with a camera aboard a high altitude balloon. In their case, the balloons can go much higher and longer than Cornell's. CSBF's balloons can reach 120,000 feet (37 km) and have flown for >50 days.

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is an (entangling) alliance designed for the defense of northern Europe, originally against potential Soviet aggression. It could easily be argued that it serves no real purpose in today's world, but even if it does, it's hard to see why NATO itself should be involved in Afghanistan.

What? Huh? You should look up what NATO really is, and it should be clear why NATO is involved in Afghanistan. Hint: NATO is a treaty of common defense among member states ie. an attack on one is considered an attack on all.

Not quite. Use k to turn on more digits if you didn't run with -l. ie:

$ bc
2k 5/4
1.25

Don't forget the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Ummm, which galaxies are closer than 100 light years?

Heh, I'll bite. Actually, this is version 2 (which came out 2 days ago). The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, and only classified galaxies as spiral or not. This is much more fine-grained and allows for significantly better research.

And seriously, 6 jobs in the last 18 months. C'mon!

If you'd like a preview, check out the results from BLAST (more results and even prettier pictures coming out very soon). Although it only has a 1.8 meter mirror, it has the same version of detectors that the SPIRE instrument on Herschel uses. To be cheaper and faster, BLAST flys on a high-altitude balloon platform. Slashdot has covered it in the past. And there's a documentary about BLAST as well (also covered by slashdot).

Disclaimer: I work on the BLAST project.

Not fully. Spitzer is mostly a shorter wavelength (best at 1-25 microns) observatory than Herschel (best at 200-600 microns). You can understand vastly different things with that difference in wavelengths.

True. But the oldest galaxies (what Herschel is mainly designed to look at) don't emit in the visible, even in their own (rest) frame. That's because the earliest galaxies are very dusty, and all this dust is opaque to the visible light. The stars are still there, glowing away, but their light is absorbed by this dust. This absorption heats the dust, warming it to 35K (give or take), which, as all things with non-zero temperature do, emits radiation like a blackbody. This light is then redshifted such that it's blackbody spectrum peaks in the submillimeter, which is what Herschel looks at.

Disclaimer: I work on BLAST, a balloon-borne experiment (cheaper than a satellite) which has detectors nearly identical to the ones of the SPIRE (main) instrument on Herschel.

True, but JWST and Herschel are looking at vastly different wavelengths of light (mostly visible and near-IR as compared to submillimeter) so they really compliment each other. JWST is a replacement for Hubble in the truest sense of the word. The article is misleading in it's claim that Herschel is a replacement for Hubble.

However, if you do the math, you'll see that even the earliest possible galaxies (redshift = z = 10 (or less)) don't get visible light redshifted into the submillimeter (where Herschel looks). This is because the earliest galaxies are very dusty, and this dust obscures most of the visible light coming from the stars. However, to obscure the light, the dust is absorbing the energy, heating the dust up (to about 35K give or take) and this dust re-radiates at like 10-100 microns or so, which is redshifted into the submillimeter (200-600 microns) that Herschel looks at.

I work on a precursor to the SPIRE instrument (a major instrument on Herschel, called BLAST which flew on a high-altitude balloon (you need to get about the atmosphere to look in the submillimeter and balloons are way cheaper than sattelites).