"Pillars of Creation" is one of my favorite photographs of all time--in fact, it's actually my desktop background, which hopefully contributes to my astro street cred without being too nerdy. First of all, its colors and form are beautiful. The picture was taken in both visible and infrared spectra, which allows the capture of the densest regions of the structure. The glow around the pillars (which might be my favorite part of the picture) is the vaporization of the material on the periphery. Unfortunately, this means that this incredible structure is gradually disappearing.
Second, this thing is huge--the pillar on the left is about four light years long. It's composed of molecular hydrogen and is an active star forming region. Thinking about the sheer size and the vast amount of hydrogen, the lightest element, that must be present to form structures as large and dense as stars is mind-boggling. In fact, the stars that this thing has created provide a large part of the energy that is destroying the pillars. Kind of sad, isn't it?
A final interesting fact about this photo is that it was taken in 2014 as kind of a tribute to a famous picture taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995--an awesome image in its own right:
Sources
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/News/2015/01/Pillars2014.jpg?mw=600
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Creation
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Eagle_nebula_pillars.jpg
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