New Panoramic Picture Taken By Hubble Space Telescope Of Pillars Of Creation

New, panoramic image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. A U.S. telescope has snapped a high-resolution panoramic view of the "Pillars of Creation," the subject of one of the orbitting Hubble Space Telescope's most famous images. Located at the heart of the Eagle Nebula, a favorite feature for amateur astronomers, the Pillars are gaseous nurseries for newborn stars -- giant nurseries. The largest of the three Pillars in the 1995 Hubble image is about four light-years from base to tip. But the Pillars are only a tiny feature (shown at center) of this new image produced by the National Science Foundation's 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. To get the image, which covers at least 100 times the area of the Hubble picture, astronomer Travis Rector used the Mosaic camera of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.