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Many people have gazed in awe at the Hubble Space Telescope
image (left) taken of the Eagle Nebula, a spectacular
star-forming region about 6,500 light-years away. Indeed, I'm
proud to say—since I "took" the picture with my
colleague Paul Scowen at Arizona State University—that
the image is arguably the most famous Hubble photograph ever
taken. But few laypeople realize just how much effort goes
into preparing such images sent down from our orbiting eye on
the universe. In this feature, I'll walk you through the
various steps it took to assemble this image from the raw
data, then end with just a bit about what the image tells us
about the "Pillars of Creation," as this fascinating star
nursery has been dubbed.
Jeff Hester is a professor in the Department of Physics and
Astronomy at Arizona State University in Tempe.
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