eagle eye (10.240)

JWST released a fresh, incredibly detailed image of the Pillars of Creation (previously), columns of densehydrogen gas and dust in the stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula some sixty-five hundred light years away in the constellation Serpens. The resolution is so sharp thanks to the telescope’s infrared vision and able to filter through some of the errant particles of the clouds and peer into the new stars forming within. The astrophotography of JWST’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, taken in 1995 and 2004—see above, propelled the distant vista, likely formed in the wake of a shockwave of a super nova into the popular imagination and made the iconic image, surely long since eroded and dispersed, part of our shared culture.