A star cluster around 2 million years young, M16 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.
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 this image, and lend it this somewhat uncommon appearance.
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 sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake). (ref.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140607.html)
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