A little mystery returned to the world this week, while scientists and citizens alike rushed to bring back images from the frontiers of deep space and the natural world.

Astronomers in Europe received their first images from the Planck observatory, a deep-space observation facility launched by the European Space Agency in May. While the BBC reported that “major science results” are not expected for a few years, Planck’s telescope has begun making a thermal picture of the Universe from its observing position over 900,000 miles from Earth.

Planck will measure cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in the hopes that it will give scientists a glimpse into the formation and structure of the Universe. When the Universe was in its infancy, the theory goes, it was hot and dense enough to collapse matter and radiation into an opaque fog of hydrogen plasma. The Universe cooled as it expanded, allowing the radiation to disperse itself throughout space. Radio telescopes like Planck’s pick up on this “background” radiation today as a faint glow in between celestial bodies.

With instruments that are capable of operating just a tenth of a degree above absolute zero (-273.05 Celsius), Planck will provide insight into this ancient expansion.

Closer to home (but still geographically opposite Ithaca), Australians didn’t need space exploration to find the final frontier. On Tuesday, just before dawn, it showed up on their doorstep in the form of a giant dust storm that turned the sky deep orange in Sydney, the country’s largest city.

Local photographers hurried to document the storm, forming a photo pool on Flickr for their eerie shots. There are more than 1,400 pictures posted. A group administrator writes on the site, “We awoke to an intense glow. We rose from our beds and we started shooting.”

By evening, Sydneysiders found themselves back from the surface of Mars as the sky returned to blue.

Dust storms are not uncommon in Australia, much of which is desert, but University of Sydney physicist Tony Monger told the Australian Associated Press that such a storm hadn’t hit an urban area in “20 or 30 years.”

The sky appeared red, he explained, because the iron-rich particles of dust kicked up during the storm caught a majority of the midday sunlight, which reflected their reddish hue across the sky. Sunlight, which is a mixture of many colors of light, scatters predominantly blue light off of air molecules under normal conditions, making the sky appear blue to the residents of Sydney and elsewhere most of the time.

So as Planck peered out into space for relics of the big bang, Aussies only had to walk outside to take a trip to the Red Planet. I’m just glad they each brought their cameras.