More than ten thousand years ago a new light would have suddenly have appeared in the night sky announcing one of the most violent cosmic event: death explosion of a massive star, also known as supernova. For a week or so the supernova outshined all of the other stars in our galaxy. Then it quickly faded away and all that was left was a tiny, dense object – a neutron star or a black hole (we don't know yet) surrounded by an expanding cloud of very hot ionized gas and dust. The elements made inside the supergiant (such as oxygen, carbon and iron) are scattered through space. This stardust eventually makes other stars, planets and possibly life, just like you and me. Yes! We, and everything you see around you, are all made of star dust!

This cosmic ghost picture was taken from my backyard during several short summer nights with a wide field lens and a dedicated mono astro-camera used with special narrow band filters. I needed more than 17 hours total exposure and few more hours of post processing to capture all those fine human-eye invisible tiny details.

The object is known as The Veil Nebula and it's located in the constellation Cygnus. The remnants have since expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter of the full Moon). Recent direct astrometric measurements concluded that it's located at 2400 light-years away from our planet.