Veil Nebula - Blog Posts
The Veil Nebula - Sharpless 103
Located 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust known as the Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula is the visible portion of a massive supernova that erupted around 7,000 years ago to form what is now known as the Cygnus Loop. The Veil Nebula has a diameter of 100 light-years which appears to be 6 times the diameter of the full moon in the night sky. Due to the scale of the Veil, astronomers often segment the nebula into western (Caldwell 34), eastern (Caldwell 33) and northern portions. This particular images shows the western portion of the nebula with NGC 6960 (the Witches Broom), NGC 6979 (Pickering’s Triangle), and other significant cataloged objects.
Credit: NASA/Digital Sky Survey
Photos of the two major components of the veil nebula, the first one is the eastern veil aka C33 and the second one (the one with the star in the middle) the western veil aka C34. Those are part of a supernova remnant (left over gas and dust from a supernova), their colour are due mainly to two gases present inside. The blue/green colour comes mostly from oxygen (as OIII emission around 500nm by doubly ionised oxygen) and a little bit from hydrogen (as H beta emission at 486nm) where as the red comes nearly completely from hydrogen (as H alpha emission at 656nm).
The first photo is about 2.5 hours of exposure (30x3 min for RGB + 10x5 min for H alpha) and the second one about 3 hours (36x3 min for RGB + 16x5 min for H alpha).
The additional photos taken in hydrogen alpha are added to the normal RGB photos to intensify the colour and visibility of the hydrogen gas (it doesn't show well enough with standard RGB in part due to the lower amount of light it emits an in part due to the sensor's response itself) Here is a version of C33 (eastern veil) with the stars removed as my friends were very impressed by it, hope you like it too.
This is the Crescent nebula it is located in the constellation Cygnus. This nebula is the result of the center star first becoming a red supergiant and ejecting some of its outer layers of gas in space, that gas cloud was then shaped into a bubble by the stellar winds emitted by the central star when it later turned into a Wolf–Rayet star.
The resulting gas bubble is heated and ionised by both the UV rays edited by the start and the stellar winds causing it to glow. Wolf-Rayet stars are the final step of some of the most massive stars before they explode into supernovas. In the case of the crescent nebula, the central star is expected to go supernova within the next few hundred thousand years (We probably still have quite a bit of time left before we observe that).
When a star goes supernova, some of the matter that composed the star is blasted off into space at extremely high velocities (up to 10% of the speed of light). This matter will then slowly (few hundred to a few tens of thousand of years) slow-down and cool-down to for me vast clouds of interstellar dust and gas. This second photo is a part of such a gas cloud, the veil nebula (the center of the western veil, also known as C34). In short, this is the photo of what's left of the corpse of a star that exploded about 10 to 20 thousand years ago.