Portal:Astronomy/Picture/Week 35 2008

The Eagle Nebula (also known as Messier Object 16, M16 or NGC 6611), perhaps one of the most famous and easily recognized space objects, is a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens. It is associated with a diffuse emission nebula, or H II region, which is catalogued as IC 4703. This region of active current star formation is about 7,000 light-years distant. The brightest star in the nebula has an apparent magnitude of 8.24, easily visible with good binoculars.

The image above is north-east part of the nebula, composite of several shots taken by Hubble Space Telescope in August 2002 using ACS instrument with 475nm (blue) and 775nm (red) wavelength filters. Color image processed by WikiSky team.