The Veil Nebula is a portion of the wispy wreckage of a supernova that exploded some eight thousand years ago. Here we see the eastern portion.
Around 6000 BC, not too long before the Egyptians built their first pyramid, a supergiant star some twenty times more massive than the Sun collapsed and rebounded in a spectacular supernova explosion. A glowing remnant, the Veil Nebula, has been expanding in the death-star’s wake ever since.
The Veil continues to balloon outward. Photos taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997 compared with those from 2015 clearly show individual filaments on the move. The strands comprising the eastern arc of the Veil appear especially bright because we’re viewing them edge-on.
I had taken some images of the Veil last year but was not happy enough with them to share in this blog. Now that the nights have become longer, and more importantly, less hazy I decided to take some considerably longer exposure images to capture more detail. This is one such result.
Since the images in this blog are relatively large and contain a lot of detail, if you are using a phone or a small tablet, you might want to consider returning sometime when you can use a computer with its larger screen.