The Eagle Nebula. Click for a larger version ~155k. Credit: ESO

I just had to show you this, it’s the Eagle Nebula.  Quite possibly my favorite. Heh, I tried and tried to get an image of this and it would just turn out to be a black picture with a few stars.  One day I decided to play around with the image and used a program to stretch the histogram and there it was!  I was so happy. I put it up here a long time ago.  So it’s for me a very dark nebula, unlike what you see here.  Of course my field of view was much smaller and onluy included the area around the spire in the center of the image.

This is an outstanding piece of work from the European Southern Observatory.

Here is the description from the ESO and you can get larger versions by clicking the ESO link:

Three-colour composite mosaic image of the Eagle Nebula (Messier 16, or NGC 6611), based on images obtained with the Wide-Field Imager camera on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory. At the centre, the so-called “Pillars of Creation” can be seen. This wide-field image shows not only the central pillars, but also several others in the same star-forming region, as well as a huge number of stars in front of, in, or behind the Eagle Nebula. The cluster of bright stars to the upper right is NGC 6611, home to the massive and hot stars that illuminate the pillars. The “Spire” — another large pillar — is in the middle left of the image.