A star estimated to be twenty times massive than our sun blew up twenty thousand years ago. It had already created a vast cavity or a bubble in its last few million years before it blew up. As the star was massive, it was fast burning its remaining fuel, and when it could no longer support further fusion, in its final moment, the star became supernova and blew itself up, sending shockwaves. The powerful shockwaves ionized the gas around the bubble it had created earlier, which we see it as a vast Veil Nebula. The nebula seen in the picture itself is 120 light-year in its diameter (i.e., the light will take 120 years to reach from its one end to another).
Such an explosion leaves a neutron star or a black-hole. Due to estimated progenitor star size, scientists are searching for a neutron-star and not a black-hole. However, to-date there is no conclusive identification of this neutron-star.
There is also a twist to the tale. If you see the image carefully, there is a smaller loop – called the southern loop. Initially, it was thought to be another supernova remanent unrelated to the Veil Nebula. Recent studies show that they both are related, and perhaps there were multiple bursts which resulted in the southern loop.
Seen in the picture are the following components of the complex:
1. Eastern Veil NGC 6992 – this section is closer to us (earth) than the Western Veil.
2. Western section NGC 6990 – Witch’s broom. You see a bright star shining on the easter veil section is not the part of the Veil Complex.
3. Pickering’s triangular wisp
4. Southern Loop (Faint loop seen towards the bottom of the main loop
About the photograph:
Veil Nebula is one of the first and most favorite summer-time objects. We wanted to capture Veil’s deep-field mosaic ever since we first saw the expanse of Veil Complex. In the sky, it occupies six times the size of the moon’s apparent size. To see full Viel, one has to manually move the telescope from the eastern to the western Veil. We have observed Veil from our 16″ telescope from semi-dark skies, and we have also seen it through our 4.5″ Starblast from dark skies of Adin.
The photograph is a 20 pane mosaic resulting in a 180-megapixel image. The image on the website is a lower resolution version of it due to its sheer size.
We took the images over 3-4 weeks in June-July of 2020. This photo is by far our longest exposure photograph with the exposure totaling over 50+ hours.
Picture 2 – Starless Veil – To improve visualization of nebula, we have created a star-less image using a deep-learning-based program called Starnet++, which runs on Google TensorFlow.
Veil Supernova Complex
Catalogue Name NGC 6960 (Witch’s broom), NGC 6992 (Eastern Veil), NGC 6979 (Pickering’s triangle)
Constellation Cygnus
Distance (Light Years) 2420 ± 75 LY(Based on Gaia measurements paper)
Photographic Information
Exposure 20 panel mosaic with Bi-color data in Hydrogen Alpha and Oxygen III data.
Equipment AGO 10” Newtonian, Paramount MyT
Processing Astro Pixel Processor, Pixinsight, Lightroom
Imaging Location Santa Clara, CA
