I suggest to look at the image in full frame, and also to zoom-in and review the details in the "pillars" and the "platform": A star cluster around two million years young, M 16 is surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas also known as The Eagle Nebula. This detailed image of the region includes cosmic sculptures 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.

This study comprises three renditions of the same data, covering a small square of sky, 10,65 arc-minutes wide: the one at the center of the image is natural color, using ionized hydrogen data (H-Alpha) to only define the structures and luminosity in the image. The one at the right of the image uses data collected from SII, H-Alpha and OIII (mapped to the Red, Green and Blue channels, respectively) to convey a more accurate notion of what substances manifest themselves in the image, and where. This pallet is commonly named the "Hubble Pallet" and is applied to many of the renowned space telescope's images. The left rendition uses the Hubble Pallet, processed to render turquoise and gold hues, rather than the "cold" green and blue hues usually dominating such narrowband processing.

More about the rendition in the center: To Northern Hemisphere viewers this area of the sky is known to be mostly red. Shooting this image from the Kalahari Desert in Namibia - deep in the Southern Hemisphere - enabled collecting color data when the object was high in the sky, letting through the green and blue hues which dominate the top part of the frame, and lend it this somewhat uncommon appearance.

M 16 and the Eagle Nebula lie about 7000 light-years away, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the
split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake). (ref. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140607.html)

Daten zum Bild