M 16 - The Eagle Nebula
The photo up here shows the starforming region M 16 in the constellation of the Snake, taken with a telescope on Earth. On April 1, 1995 (not a joke!), the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) made his well-known photograph of the same nebula's centre (below right, marked with a blue frame in the image above). This photograph is not in real colours, in contrast with what many people think. In this compilation of three black-and-white photographs, each of them taken in another wavelength, every colour represents a chemical element of wich the nebula exists (red - sulfur; blue - ionized oxygen; green - hydrogen). The colours are add with a computer. In consequence, the stars are all coloured pink, but their's nothing to conclude out of this.
With the help of an image processing program, I've adapted the photograph; the Eagle Nebula the way you should see with the HST is reproduced in the image below left. The Nebula itself has a magenta colour. Most of the star are blueish and have a much greater surface radiance than the gas in the nebula. The contrast between the parts of the nebula to one another is smaller than in the HST-image but there's no less detail visible.
