Pillars of Creation, Messier 16

Pillars of Creation, Messier 16  This image shows the Pillars of Creation made famous in the Hubble 1995 image. In comparison is the 2014 Hubble image. 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. 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. While the detail is not as good as the Hubble image it speaks well for an image made with a 20″ terrestrial telescope.