Pillars of Creation

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.

The original Hubble image is in the top right corner, however 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.