This was a tough image to process – there were a bunch of tiny dark gaps and hot pixels scattered throughout the image. The image file sizes were also quite big, so processing took a long time. Nevertheless, I got a result that I am proud of! The data is just too good to process badly. I have to give so much credit to the HLSP team – they really did a phenomenal job creating this mosaic.
These towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas sit at the heart of M16, or the Eagle Nebula. The aptly named Pillars of Creation, featured in this stunning Hubble image, are part of an active star-forming region within the nebula and hide newborn stars in their wispy columns.
Although this is not Hubble’s first image of this iconic feature of the Eagle Nebula, it is the most detailed. The blue colors in the image represent oxygen, red is sulfur, and green represents both nitrogen and hydrogen. The pillars are bathed in the scorching ultraviolet light from a cluster of young stars located just outside the frame. The winds from these stars are slowly eroding the towers of gas and dust.
Image:
Details:
All data was taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) from the following proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=13926
Red: hlsp_heritage_hst_wfc3-uvis_m16_f673n_v1_drz
Green: hlsp_heritage_hst_wfc3-uvis_m16_f657n_v1_drz
Blue: hlsp_heritage_hst_wfc3-uvis_m16_f502n_v1_drzProcessing:
- Histogram stretch to clip bad data
- average three images to create Lum
- EZ soft stretch on all three channels
- EZ soft stretch on Lum
- LRGB combination
- Get rid of artifacts in photoshop
- So much curves – this took by far the most time
- A bit of histogram to enhance the pillars
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