About This Image

Credit, title, date. UT 11-20-1995. printed 1998 for TIME's 75th Anniversary Exhibition.

In 1995, the Hubble Telescope snapped a stunning photo in the Eagle Nebula, 6,500 light years from Earth. The photo revealed three gigantic columns of cold gas, illuminated by the ultraviolet light from nearby young stars. The Pillars of Creation became one of the telescope’s most iconic and popular images.

Paul Scowen of Arizona State University in Tempe led the original Hubble observations of the Eagle Nebula. He recalled what it was like seeing the photo for the first time.“We laid the pictures out on the table, and we were just gushing because of all the incredible detail that we were seeing for the very first time,” he said in a press release from NASA.

Star forming pillars in the Eagle Nebula, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope's WFPC2. The picture is composed of 32 different images from four separate cameras in this instrument. The photograph was made with light emitted by different elements in the cloud and appears as a different color in the composite image: green for hydrogen, red for singly-ionized Sulphur and blue for double-ionized oxygen atoms. The missing part at the top right is because one of the four cameras has a magnified view of its portion, which allows astronomers to see finer detail. The images from this camera were scaled down in size to match those from the other three cameras.

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