The Hubble telescope has been spinning round the Earth for a while now. To celebrate its 100,000th orbit NASA and ESA have released this rather striking image, which one of Nature’s editors claims resembles a t-shirt she was rather fond of in the 80s.

What it actually shows is a star-forming region about 170,000 light-years away. According to the press release:

The three-dimensional-looking image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head “pillars of creation”, and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars.

The red is emission from sulphur atoms, the green shows hydrogen and the blue oxygen.

Image: NASA, ESA and M. Livio (STScI)