The Veil Nebula
About 10,000 years ago, a massive star in the constellation Cygnus exploded. The shock wave from that detonation is still expanding — a shell of superheated gas roughly 130 light-years across, racing outward at over 600,000 km/h. The Veil Nebula is what that shock wave looks like today, 2,400 light-years from where you’re sitting.
This wide-field image spans nearly 4 degrees of sky — about 8 times the width of the full Moon — capturing both the Eastern and Western Veil arcs in a single frame. The red filaments are hydrogen, heated and swept up by the expanding blast wave. The steel-blue threads are oxygen, glowing at a different wavelength. Neither is visible to the naked eye; each required hours of dedicated exposure through narrowband filters to reveal.
Sky Position
Processing
This image combined over 11 hours of data across seven filters — hydrogen-alpha, oxygen-III, sulfur-II, luminance, and RGB — each processed independently and then layered together. The challenge was bringing out the faint red hydrogen dust that permeates the background without washing out the delicate steel-blue oxygen filaments or clipping the brighter structures. I chose a slightly unconventional color palette for the narrowband gases — the O-III in particular leans cooler and more steel-blue than the typical electric-blue rendition — because I wanted this version to feel distinctly mine, not just another Veil shot. It was selected as an AstroBin Top Pick candidate.
Comments