I’m a little snowed under this week, both with new projects at work and with finishing off the paper I mentioned I’ve been working on. So today’s picture comes with less explanation but I hope you’ll agree it’s striking enough on its own.
The Eagle Nebula
This is the Eagle Nebula photographed by Hubble. If that sounds familiar it means you’ve been paying attention: I showed a much smaller detail of the gas cloud a couple of months ago. I said the pillars had been ‘carved’ by radiation from new stars forming in the cloud: the same is true for the whole beautiful cave-like structure you can see here.
Those ‘Pillars of Creation’ which were a whopping 5 light-years or 30,000 billion miles long appear so small in the centre of this larger picture they’re easy to miss. To help you find them, here’s a blow-up of the middle half of this image: the Pillars are marked by the smaller of the two green boxes.
