It's one year ago today that Herschel and Planck were propelled up into space to survey the Universe—the "cool" Universe, to be more specific—on behalf of humanity. (Of course, it wasn't William Herschel and Max Planck who were sent a million miles from the earth on top of a rocket, but rather the European Space Agency—ESA—satellites named after them.) ESA wishes them both a happy birthday on their website, and there are similar felicitations from the UK Herschel page, both with links to the exciting results and stunning images being released.

Meanwhile, we've been busy putting together the first results from HerMES, a major project on Herschel looking at star formation in hundreds of thousands of very distant galaxies. These were among the many results announced last week at an ESA conference in The Netherlands (which included a media event), and now the HerMES scientific papers are being made available to anyone who enjoys reading that kind of thing, and, indeed to anyone who doesn't. For mere mortals, though, the pretty pictures are on OSHI, the Online Showcase of Herschel Images and on the Herschel blog.