Dan Dare in The Pillars of Creation Mystery!

The above is a picture of the so called "Pillars of Creation" taken by the Hubble space telescope. According to Wiki: 

"Pillars of Creation" is a photograph taken by the Hubble Telescope of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, some 7,000 light years from Earth.^[1] They are so named because the gas and dust are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed.^[2] Taken April 1, 1995, it was named one of the top ten photographs from the Hubble by Space.com.^[3]

That's very interesting especially if you now take a look at the following picture of deep space; It comes not from the Eagle Nebula but the Eagle Boys Comic of 1957 which was running a Dan Dare story called "The Reign of the Robots".

Is it just me or does that dark space cloud in the Dan Dare story have more than a passing resemblance to the Pillars of Creation? My best guess is that the artists of this particular story* may have seen some of the nebulae pictures returned by the powerful telescopes of the day, such as the Hale Telescope.  See for example this photo of the Eagle Nebula taken by the Mount Palomar Hale Telescope in 1965: 

(Picture from: http://palomarskies.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/astrophoto-friday-m16-eagle-nebula.html)

If you look carefully at this photo you can see the Pillars of Creation. Did the Eagle artists deliberately choose images from the Eagle Nebula?  If so that bright "double" star in the Palomar photo may also have crept into the artist's picture! The Palomar Skies blog spot says this about the photo:

The photo was taken in 1965 with the 200-inch Hale Telescope. M16 is an emission nebula and associated open star cluster located about 7,000 light years distant in the direction of the constellation of Serpent

Perhaps I might be pushing the resemblances a bit too far in noting that the Mekon's satellite which appears in The Eagle's front page deep space picture does look a little bit like the dome of a telescope!

The Hale Telescope

All very intriguing, but I'm not quite sure what it all adds up to! I suppose the artist's work could have been subliminal and dream-like rather than a self aware aping of the telescope images. Dreams can and do patch together linked symbolic images in this haphazard way.

Footnote:

* The artists were Frank Hampson and Harold Johns: See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dan_Dare_stories