Eagle Nebula

Undersea corral? Enchanted castles? Space serpents? These eerie, dark pillar-like structures are actually columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars. The pillars protrude from the interior wall of a dark molecular cloud like stalagmites from the floor of a cavern. They are part of the "Eagle Nebula" (also called M16 - the 16th object in Charles Messier's 18th century catalog of "fuzzy" objects that aren't comets), a nearby star-forming region 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Serpens.

There is soooo much detail I've zoomed in to show the amazing detail in the central pillar.

I created this image from 3 separate images created from raw data files taken by Hubble in 1995 using the UVIS camera and downloaded from the Hubble Science Archive portal. Each image is a combination of 3 narrowband images (F673, F502, F657) mapped to the Red, Green and Blue channels.

Image produced from raw data downloaded from MAST: the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes

Original image by ESA/Hubble, alignment, integration and colour mapping by Arc Fortnight.