One of the major discoveries of the IRAS mission was the presence of dust emission around some normal Main Sequence stars, including the most "normal" of them all, Vega. This star was widely used as a prime photometric standard and it was anticipated to be a good calibration star also for IRAS. It was quickly realised that the dust could not be a leftover from the accretion disc and the it must be the result of the collisions of larger bodies, giving rise to a debris disk. Another A star, beta Pictoris showed a much larger IR excess, and the disk around this star could rapidly be imaged in the optical showing that it is seen edge-on. The dust around Vega has so far not been detected in the optical.
Herschel offers a much better spatial resolution than previous IR satellites and I will show our first results for Vega and beta Pictoris. I will also discuss our attempts to detect the ring around Vega with PolCor (our polarising coronagraph, designed to detect circumstellar dust)