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The "Eye of God" NASA photo.

This NASA photo has been called "The Eye of God."
Many claims are made about this photo, some true, some false.

It is a NASA photo - TRUE
It is a Hubble photo - Almost TRUE. It is a color-enhanced composite of Hubble and ground-based images from an Arizona observatory.
It only occurs every 3,000 years - FALSE It was discovered in 1824 and has been "occurring" ever since. There's no reason to believe it wasn't occurring before then.
NASA calls it the "Eye of God" - FALSE While it is often referred to as the Eye of God, it is not done so by NASA.

General information:

This has been an Internet regular since 2003. The accompanying e-mail is generally similar to this:

See attachment . . . it is a picture taken by NASA with the Hubble telescope. They are referring to it as the "Eye of God". This photo is a very rare one. This kind of event occurs once in 3000 years. This photo has done miracles in many lives, so please don't delete it. Make a wish... you have looked at the eye of God. It really choked me up. Whether you believe it or not, don't keep this mail with you.

As stated above, some of the claims are true, other are patently false. It is a NASA photo of the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293). It was created by combining photos from Hubble and the wide-view camera of the ground-based Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. It is color enhanced. The reds and blues aren't the actual colors (Hubble doesn't take color photos).

Original NASA composite

Click to Enlarge

This is the original black and white composite of "The Eye of God" before enhancing. It is composed of multiple images from Hubble tiled together. These were then combined with ground-based photos and then color enhanced.

Hubble doesn't take color images. It records images in shades of gray. It doesn't have "natural color" cameras.

Articles on how the "Eye of God" photo was created:

How color is added to Hubble images:

Watch the animated movie that shows how nebulae form and why they look similar to an eye.

Other Images of the Helix Nebula (click images to enlarge)

"Eye of God" as seen from a telescope

Jack Schmidling Productions, Inc. (includes photos of other Nebulae)

Color Enhancing and Science
Color enhancing black and and white images is a common practice. It enables the human eye to see details that otherwise would be missed. By coincidence, I'm currently working on a scientific application that uses color enhancement to analyze laser data. Here's an example of what our program does to black and white laser data images. The images have the same pixel information, but the colors are changed. Notice how details that are hard to see in the original black and white are obvious with the color changes

Helix Nebula:

The Helix Nebula is about 650 light years from Earth and is in the constellation Aquarius. It is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to earth. A planetary nebula is gas around what used to be a star. Our Sun is expected to suffer the same fate in about 5 billion years. See Also

More information:

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