Beautiful Photograph du Jour

The first images are coming in from the Planck Telescope, an European Space Agency-launched observatory, including this incomplete composite from a survey of radiation that first swept out across space just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Planck maps tiny temperature variations (the mottled colors in the strip) in nine frequency ranges shown overlaid here. These fluctuations correspond to the matter distribution in the early cosmos. Planck needs six months to complete a full sky map.