Our Evolving View of the Cosmic Microwave Background - Revolving!

After putting together my Spinning Moons post, I didn't want my cosmologist friends to feel left out - so I constructed some spinning maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from different observational eras.



The earliest comes from the COBE satellite, launched in 1989.

Next came the much more detailed results from the WMAP satellite, launched in 2001.

Our most recent and detailed view comes from ESA's Planck satellite, launched in 2009.

Bonus! Here's a view of the K-band (23 GHz) foreground contamination, showing the mess that is our home galaxy as seen by the WMAP satellite.