It's taken 17 years of failed attempts to shoot a photo like this. This is M-16, the Eagle Nebula, a cloud of interstellar hydrogen some 7000 light-years away. This is a view back in time. This is fossil light. Sometime around 5000 B.C., toward the end of the Stone Age, the photons left this region and began their long journey at 186,000 miles per second until finally they passed through my lens and saturated my film.