That small dark shape at the centre of the bright zone is the Pillars of Creation, and it’s worth sitting with how little of the frame it takes up: Hubble’s 1995 portrait made those columns famous, but they’re a tiny piece of a cloud that fills this entire image. The pillars are dense gas holding out while radiation from young stars in the cluster strips away everything softer around them, sculpting from the outside in. Every dark lane and pocket you see here is the same process at different stages. Roughly 5,700 light-years away in Serpens.
