Eagle (M16) (2013)

Just for fun. This is arguably Hubble’s most famous image. A poll run at Asterisk in tandem with an APOD of the nebula asked readers if they had ever seen the image before and 95% of votes were yes.

Combining the f547m data on the green and blue channels allowed me to make the stars appear white rather than neon magenta. I also applied a good deal of sharpening. Filling the upper right corner with cloned data is tempting, but it’s not really that bad if you color the missing data similarly to the surrounding sky. Besides, I’m quite fond of the way the telescope was positioned to fit the pillars into the WFPC2’s funny framing.

Red: hst_05773_05_wfpc2_f673n_wf_sci
Green: hst_05773_05_wfpc2_f656n_wf_sci + hst_05773_05_wfpc2_f547m_wf_sci
Blue: hst_05773_05_wfpc2_f502n_wf_sci + hst_05773_05_wfpc2_f547m_wf_sci

North is NOT up. It is 42.2° counter-clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.