Natural History is a broad field of study that includes not just the study of the physical and biological aspects of Earth, but also of Space. In recognition of the role that Astronomy and other space fields play in our understanding of Natural History, check out this recently released image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
This week the NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team unveiled spectacular images of the “Pillars of Creation” 6500 light-years away in the Eagle Nebula.
The gorgeous new images were made possible thanks to recent upgrades to the telescope which allowed the Pillars to be imaged at a wider angle and at twice the resolution. A few things have changed according to NASA,
“By comparing the 1995 and 2014 pictures, astronomers also noticed a lengthening of a narrow jet-like feature that may have been ejected from a newly forming star. The jet looks like a stream of water from a garden hose. Over the intervening 19 years, this jet has stretched farther into space, across an additional 60 billion miles, at an estimated speed of about 450,000 miles per hour.”
But the Pillars aren’t the only amazing image provided by Hubble. The team also spent 394 hours imaging the Andromeda Galaxy and their efforts yielded an absolutely massive image showing circa 100 million stars.
A 6000 X 1918 high-resolution image can be found below but if you want to see the full resolution images at 17,384 X 5558, you can download them from Hubble here. Warning: these are very large files compared to most images you find online. The TIFF format Full Resolution Image is almost 349 Mb so download with care.
