Image 7-23
Eagle Nebula

This amazing image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope a story of life and death in the Eagle nebula, an vast star factory located 7,000 light-years away in the Serpens constellation. The image shows the region's entire network of turbulent clouds and newborn stars in infrared light. The color green denotes cooler towers and fields of dust, including the three famous space pillars which were photographed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. Red represents hotter dust thought to have been warmed by the explosion of a massive star about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago.