New Images of Eagle Nebula

A beautiful section of famous Eagle Nebula was observed thanks to Hubble Telescope.
This star cloud is called NGC 6611, and it is 6500 light years far from Earth. It is a young star cloud that contains many blue stars, and these stars, with their strong radiations, are the ones that gives to Eagle Nebula its sparkle. Another name of this cloud is Messier 16.

When we talk about Eagle Nebula, you would surely recognize this particular image:

The tower of gas that can be seen coming off the nebula is approximately 97 milliards km high.

The brightest star in the nebula has an apparent magnitude of +8.2, and it is easily visible with a good binocular, nothing too expensive by the way.
Eagle Nebula always fascinated astronomers and scientists, surely because of his strange and evocative shape, but even for the mysteries it hides.

The last image taken from Hubble. Credit: ESA/NASA Hubble

Astronomers refers to this cloud as “Region HII”. This is the scientific name of ionized hydrogen, and in this region this is a great quantity of this element.
In the image above, the black zones are really dense agglomerated of gas and dusts, so the light cannot pass and reach our point of observation. Many of these zones could hide some phases of star formation.
Nebula are everywhere in the Universe. If you look up to the sky, where there aren’t any lights you could see some black zones that block star lights in the background.

This image was created using a mosaic of photographs taken by Hubble using a combination of filters (F775W, the blue one, and F850LP, the red one). The image was obviously elaborated and coloured thanks to other images taken by other telescopes.

Click the images to see them in the original size:

Hubble continuously send us images from every zone of the space he’s analyzing. Every image require some adjustments and work. ESA is actually working on a site that should give everyone the opportunity to collaborate with graphic designers and submit your own rework on initial images taken from Hubble. In this way, not only the public will have the opportunity to interact with researches about space, but we’ll begin to feel the sense of coalition this step in humankind will bring.

This is HubbleSite: http://hubblesite.org/ . Take a look at all the wonderful pictures that this little miracle of technology has taken until now.