A red cloud of hydrogen gas with a bright cluster of young blue-white stars at its centre and dark dust pillars silhouetted below them.

Eagle Nebula

Emission nebula in Se2

A nursery of new stars. The dark shapes near the middle are the dust pillars made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Also catalogued as Eagle Nebula, M16, Messier 16, NGC 6611

Measurements and positionShow
Position
Right ascension 18h 18m 48.2s Declination −13° 48′ 26″J2000
Where the object sits on the sky, in the coordinate system astronomers use. Right ascension is the east–west figure and declination the north–south one; J2000 names the reference date they are measured against.
Brightness
6.00
Apparent magnitude. The scale runs backwards — a smaller number is brighter, and around 6 is roughly the faintest the unaided eye can see from a dark site.
Apparent size
120.0 arcminutes
How large the object looks from here, not how large it is. The full Moon is about 30 arcminutes across, which is a useful thing to compare against.

Catalogue data from OpenNGC (Mattia Verga) · CC-BY-SA-4.0