This episode of Astronomycast is brought to you by Swinburn Astronomy Online, the world's longest running online astronomy degree program.

Visit astronomy.swin.edu.au for more information.

Astronomycast, episode 173 from 1-date January 18, 2009, a Herschel Space Observatory.

Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Kane, I'm the publisher of the universe today, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gaye, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Evertsville.

Pamela, how are you doing?

I'm doing well. How are you doing, Fraser?

Doing great. Now, I understand that you have a task that you wish to get some help with from the listeners.

I do. I have a homework assignment for all of you. Now, when we look at our Google stats, it gives us a vague idea of where people coming to our site are coming from, but it doesn't give us personality, it doesn't help us explain to other people who our audience is.

So I'm going to ask you to do something that I hope is simple. Go get a postcard of where you live and just send it to us, no matter where on the planet you are.

We have a PO box. You can reach us at astronomy cast at PO box 804 Edwardsville, Illinois 62025, and we can post that address on our website.

So all I want is a postcard, just a postcard, simple postcard, say, hey, hi.

Having fun, wish you were here. Here's a picture of the acropolis.

And give us a face to who you are.

That would be cool.

Last week we talked about Herschel's, the people William Herschel, his sister Carolyn and his son, John, and this week we're going to look at the Herschel Space Observatory.

Herschel the robot, mission launched in 2009 to reveal the coldest and dustiest regions in the universe.

Alright, so let's talk a bit about the Herschel telescope then. So what is it?

It's a telescope.

Thank you for that. But what is it?

It's an infrared observatory that was launched May 14, 2009 that is the biggest and the most infrared observing of the infrared observatories that have been launched into space so far.

So we're going to compare those to spits or then, right?

...