Herschel, Hubble Space Telescopes See Greater Detail in Horsehead Nebula [Slideshow]

One of the most recognizable and popular images from space --- of the so-called Horsehead Nebula in the Orion Constellation --- has gotten a make-over.

Europe's Herschel space observatory and NASA's Hubble space observatory have both fixed their gazes back on the region of space where the horsehead-like cloud of stellar dust is found, about 1,300 light years from Earth.

The new images produced by the two exploration stations have provided scientists a much broader sense of what is happening in that patch of sky.

"You need images at all scales and at all wavelengths in astronomy in order to understand the big picture and the small detail," said Matt Griffin, the principal researcher working with the Herschel Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver, an imaging camera and low-resolution spectrometer.

"In this new Herschel view, the Horsehead looks like a little feature - a pimple," BBC News was told by the professor from Cardiff University in Wales "In reality, of course, it is a very large entity in its own right, but in this great sweep of a picture from Herschel you can see that the nebula is set within an even larger, molecular-cloud complex where there is a huge amount of material and a great range of conditions."

To put things into perspective, the Horsehead Nebula, actually designated "Barnard 33" in research catalogues, spans about five light-years.

Named after astronomer William Herschel, who discovered infrared radiation while studying the sun in 1800, the Herschel observatory is one of the largest space telescope arrays ever launched.

Infrared shines through gas and dust clouds that can otherwise block visible light, but the earth's atmosphere absorbs infrared.

So, Herschel was launched in 2009 to get a clearer view of the infrared side of the universe.

"You can also see nebulosity where material has been lit up from inside by stars; and features like the Horsehead Nebula where that star formation has yet to really get going." Griffin said. "You can see all the things we look for in Herschel images - the filaments, the bubbles; the wispy material, the reddish material that hasn't yet actually started to form stars,"

While Herschel observes the nebula in long wavelengths, Hubble sees the Horsehead in near-infrared light, much shorter wavelengths that can reveal finer, sharper detail than Herschel.

Hubble's new view was acquired by its Wide Field Camera-3 instrument, installed by astronauts on the last shuttle servicing mission in 2009.

A scholarly paper describing Herschel's investigation of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex has been published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.