Truly out of this world.

Just puts everything back into perspective.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revisited one of its most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. This image shows the pillars as seen in visible light, capturing the multi-coloured glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-coloured elephants’ trunks of the nebula’s famous pillars. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. With these new images comes better contrast and a clearer view for astronomers to study how the structure of the pillars is changing over time.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has revisited one of its most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. This image shows the pillars as seen in visible light, capturing the multi-coloured glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-coloured elephants’ trunks of the nebula’s famous pillars. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. With these new images comes better contrast and a clearer view for astronomers to study how the structure of the pillars is changing over time.

I subscribe to EarthSky and the link to this image and background information was in yesterday’s daily summary. The mind-blowing facts are that the Eagle Nebula is found in the constellation Serpens and is 6,500 light-years away from our dear planet.  To put that into context, that is 38,210 trillion miles from us. The star cluster associated with the nebula is about 5.5 million years old.

EarthSky has the very interesting text of the NASA Press Release regarding this new, high-resolution image.

For me, I just want to let that image wash over me. Not least because it reminds me that I am a very lucky person to be living at a time when one can lose oneself in such sights.

Here’s the image again, this time without the explanation.

New view of the Pillars of Creation — visible

10 thoughts on “Truly out of this world.”

      1. It is software, yes. There was a classic game called ‘Elite’ I played in the 1980s; Elite: Dangerous is an updated version of it. The original took place in a fictitious galaxy, but the new version simulates our own Milky Way galaxy. I don’t know how well…

        As for ‘time shift’, I there will be some sort of ‘hyperspace jump’ you can use to cross long distances in a single bound. I’ll probably get a copy at some point, but I’ll have to update my video graphics card to do so; what I currently have can’t handle the latest crop of games.

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      3. Also possibly of interest is Celestia, an open source software program that allows you to explore the universe. It’s a bit long in the tooth (relatively speaking), but it doesn’t require much grunt on the graphics front — and it’s free. More information at the ‘Motherlode‘.

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