Pillars of Creation

Rare card · No. 38405

Pillars of Creation is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that depicts elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula of the constellation Serpens, some 6,500–7,000 light-years (2,000–2,100 pc) from Earth. These elephant trunks had been discovered by John Charles Duncan in 1920 on a plate made with the Mount Wilson Observatory 60-inch telescope. They are so named because the gas and dust are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed. Taken on April 1, 1995, it was named one of the top ten photographs from Hubble by Space.com. The astronomers responsible for the photo were Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen from Arizona State University. The region was rephotographed by ESA's Herschel Space Observatory in 2011, again by Hubble in 2014 with a newer camera, and the James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Released in 2007, Chandra X-ray Observatory (AXAF) had observed the area in 2001. It did...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Credit: NASA, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University), Public domain