Inside the Eagle Nebula - Wonderful!!

Explanation: In 1995, a now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This remarkable false-color composite image revisits the nearby stellar nursery with image data from the orbiting Herschel Space Observatory and XMM-Newton telescopes. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly, including the famous pillars and other structures near the center of the scene. Toward the other extreme of the electromagnetic spectrum, XMM-Newton's X-ray vision reveals the massive, hot stars of the nebula's embedded star cluster. Hidden from Hubble's view at optical wavelengths, the massive stars have a profound effect, sculpting and transforming the natal gas and dust structures with their energetic winds and radiation. In fact, the massive stars are short lived and astronomers have found evidence in the image data pointing to the remnant of a supernova explosion with an apparent age of 6,000 years. If true, the expanding shock waves would have destroyed the visible structures, including the famous pillars. But because the Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, their destruction won't be witnessed for hundreds of years.

SOURCE: APOD

True colors:

reply to post by elevenaugust


My God its soooo prettty
i always wanted to see its true colour, i have a space book and i always hate it when its not a true colour pic or "artist impression" ..dont get me wrong those guys do a great job, but nothing like the real thing

what a great way to start a friday thx very much!!


EDIT: love your sig

Amazing, a word that does not even come close to describing it.
Leaves you speechles doesnt it?

most beautifull place in space (so far)...

ty OP for the nice pictures =)

I could not see a direct similarity between the images, but it turns out there is a 90 degrees angle between the two.

So from what I understand the somewhat transparent dots in the middle is a star cluster? It seems to me that most stars can also be seen in the hubble picture, so I don't really understand what they mean with "Hidden from Hubble's view at optical wavelengths".

But indeed a beautiful image

Gorgeous thread eleven, nebula images are eye-candy

reply to post by -PLB-

How about this view:

Appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. The soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 90 trillion kilometres high, about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star.

reply to post by Realm52


i can see a seahorse in there very nice!!!