Eagle Nebula, Messier 16

Eagle Nebula, Messier 16 The Eagle Nebula consists of an open star cluster around 2 million years young surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas. This image highlights cosmic scuptures made famous in Hubble Space Telescope close-ups of the starforming complex. Described as elephant trunks or Pillars of Creation, dense, dusty columns rising near the center are light-years in length but are gravitationally contracting to form stars. Energetic radiation from the cluster stars erodes material near the tips, eventually exposing the embedded new stars. Imaged first in 1995, small changes were detected in a second image done in 2014. Extending from the ridge of bright emission left of center is another dusty starforming column known as the Fairy of the Eagle Nebula. M16 and the Eagle Nebula lie about 7,000 light-years away, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the summer Milky Way in the direction of the center of the galaxy. The image was done using narrowband filters and using the Hubble palette where the red color comes from Sulfur gas emission that is excited by ultraviolet light from the stars in the cluster. The green color comes from Hydrogen gas emission and the blue color from Oxygen gas emission. To capture the details seen in this image a total of 226 images were taken over 68 hours.