Notes:
The Eagle Nebula
In 1995 the Hubble Space Telescope was turned to Messier’s M16. The HST offered us an enlarged view of the heart of this nebula, often referred to even in professional publications as “the elephant trunks” of M16. This picture shows a wonderful impression of three dimensions with the central pink star illuminating the left-most trunk but being physically behind the right-most trunks leaving them in shadow. Also there have many suggestions of imagery in this picture, for example the cat crouched down in the left trunk. Furthermore you may have noticed in other HST images the strange shape, this is because HST images are generally a composite of 4 separate adjacent images combined together, with the top-right-hand corner image being of a higher magnification (designed initially for detailed viewing of planets), so it has to be scaled down to fit in with the other three images. Typically this camera would aligned on a region of particular interest, say the nucleus of a galaxy. Also just as an aside there’s a good example of diffraction of stars here, quite often bright stars in astronomical images appear to have spokes coming out from them - they are just a diffraction effect of the particular instrument and not a real feature.