Beginning its mission on 14th May 2009 and transmitting its final data on April 29th this year (when it ran out of coolant), Herschel was a space observatory that made tens of thousands of scientific observations over its short lifespan.

Herschel was designed by the European Space Agency, who explain the observatory's instruments "observed almost a tenth of the entire sky for over 23,500 hours, providing new views into the previously hidden Universe, pointing to unseen star birth and galaxy formation, and tracing water through the Universe from molecular clouds to newborn stars and to their planet-forming discs and belts of comets."

It can be difficult to comprehend an operation of this scale, so ESA have helpfully released a video that provides an animated timelapse of the Herschel mission. Produced by Pedro Gómez-Alvarez, the video illustrates the whole of Herschel's operations into less than a minute.

Check out the video below, and visit the ESA website for more information on Herschel and the video's content.

In another impressive space timelapse, NASA has released a moving image of two comets' paths over the course of a day, as monitored by their STEREO-A spacecraft. The direction of the comets' tails can help astronomers and scientists examine solar wind conditions (i.e. the wavy 'cloud' approaching from the right):