The "Pillars of Creation" shot from 1995 is one of the iconic images in the history of space study and so the Hubble Telescope has gone back to take another look two decades later.

According to BBC News, the Hubble Telescope is going on 25 years in orbit and the Pillars photo is one of the earliest and easily the most recognizable one. Some 7,000 light years away, the image depicts the formation of a star and the pillar-like objects are dust and gas.

At the annual American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle this week, Paul Scowen, of Arizona State University, revealed the new, higher definition image next to the old one. He described the new photo as "new pictures of an old friend."

"I'm impressed by how transitory these structures are. They are actively being ablated away before our very eyes," he said in a press release from NASA. "The ghostly bluish haze around the dense edges of the pillars is material getting heated up and evaporating away into space. We have caught these pillars at a very unique and short-lived moment in their evolution."

The Pillars are seen in the Andromeda Galaxy, a close neighbor to our own Milky Way Galaxy. The new, re-mastered image also offers a look at the other galaxy in stunning, never-before-seen detail.

"These pillars represent a very dynamic, active process," Scowen said. "The gas is not being passively heated up and gently wafting away into space. The gaseous pillars are actually getting ionized, a process by which electrons are stripped off of atoms, and heated up by radiation from the massive stars. And then they are being eroded by the stars' strong winds and barrage of charged particles, which are literally sandblasting away the tops of these pillars."