April 24 marks the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Telescope. To celebrate, NASA and the European Space Agency, which jointly run the telecope, released this image of the star cluster Westerlund 2. (NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/A. Nota/Westerlund 2 Science Team)

To earn a name like “Pillars of Creation” requires something pretty spectacular. When in 1995 the Hubble telescope snapped a shot of three wispy gas columns enshrouded in light from a nearby group of stars, the structures in the Eagle Nebula proved they deserved the moniker.

Nearly 20 years later, the telescope has returned to the Pillars of Creation, resulting in two new shots of the towers, one in visible light, the other in near-infrared light (the first two images in the slideshow above).

The — a combination of several exposures — reveals an array of color generated from emissions from different gases. The orange, for example, represents sulphur, the blue, oxygen, according to the Hubble Site from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). And much as in the original image, the brightness from a nearby cluster of stars make the pillars appear to glow.

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“Streamers of gas can be seen bleeding off the pillars as the intense radiation heats and evaporates it into space,” STScI writes. “Denser regions of the pillars are shadowing material beneath them from the powerful radiation. Stars are being born deep inside the pillars, which are made of cold hydrogen gas laced with dust.”

The looks likes a vast expanse of twinkling stars punctuated by a ghostly, dark structure. The colors of the first image disappear in the second because the near-infrared light can “penetrate much of the gas and dust, revealing stars behind the nebula as well as hidden away inside the pillars,” notes STScI. The blueish outline results from the star cluster heating up material around the edges of the pillars, which are 5 light-years tall.

Capturing the as they appear in these images is somewhat lucky, noted Paul Scowen of Arizona State University, one of two astronomers who lead the original Hubble observations of the Eagle Nebula. “We have caught these pillars at a very unique and short-lived moment in their evolution.”

Comparing the new shots to those taken in 1995 has uncovered how the nebula is changing, Scowen said. For example, what astronomers have described as a “narrow jet-like feature” has lengthened significantly in the two decades since the initial photo, traveling at approximately 450,000 miles per hour and extending an additional 60 billion miles.

Whatever else scientists learn from this image, Hubble’s return trip to the Pillars of Creation seems to have been worth the wait.

MORE FROM WEATHER.COM: More Amazing Space Images

The ESO 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla observatory in Chile, during observations. (ESO/S. Brunier)