The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus.

It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant, many portions of which have acquired their own individual names and catalogue identifiers. The source supernova was a star 20 times more massive than the Sun which exploded between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.=10.5px At the time of explosion, the supernova would have appeared brighter than Venus in the sky, and visible in daytime. The remnants have since expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, and 36 times the area, of the full Moon). While previous distance estimates have ranged from 1200 to 5800 light-years, a recent determination of 2400 light-years is based on direct astrometric measurements.

The nebula was discovered on 5 September 1784 by William Herschel. He described the western end of the nebula as "Extended; passes thro' 52 Cygni... near 2 degree in length", and described the eastern end as "Branching nebulosity ... The following part divides into several streams uniting again towards the south."When finely resolved, some parts of the nebula appear to be rope-like filaments. The standard explanation is that the shock waves are so thin, less than one part in 50,000 of the radius, that the shell is visible only when viewed exactly edge-on, giving the shell the appearance of a filament. At the estimated distance of 2400 light-years, the nebula has a radius of 65 light-years (a diameter of 130 light-years).

The thickness of each filament is 1⁄50,000th of the radius, or about 4 billion miles, roughly the distance from Earth to Pluto. Undulations in the surface of the shell lead to multiple filamentary images, which appear to be intertwined.The Veil Nebula is expanding at a velocity of about 1.5 million kilometers per hour. Using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 1997 and 2015, the expansion of the Veil Nebula has been directly observed.

Date: 05 Nov 2022
Subs: 30 x 300s
Scope: Orion 102mm APO
Mount: Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro
Primary Camera: ZWO ASI183MC Pro
Gain: 100
Guide Scope: Williams Optics 50mm UniGuide
Guide Cmaera: ZWO ASI120MM Mini
Other: ASIAIR Plus (3rd Gen)