The East Veil Nebula

Supernova remnant NGC-6692 - The East Veil Nebula. Taken under Michigan skies, July 2022

A Supernova Remnant

The East Veil Nebula is one portion of the much larger supernova remnant known as the Veil Nebula. As the name suggests, a supernova remnant are the remains of a star which has undergone runaway nuclear fusion resulting in a massively luminous explosion. The supernova event that created the Veil Nebula happened about 10,000-20,000 years ago.

This image was taken using only two different narrowband filters: Hydrogen-alpha (Hα) and Oxygen-3 (Oiii). The red in the image comes from the Hα data while the Oiii is assigned equally to the green and blue color channels. Realistically, Hα is in the deeper end of the red spectrum while Oxygen-3 is more in between green and blue. The image may not be that far off from what the actual color appearance of the nebula looks like. Being able to record the object in different wavelengths makes it much easier observe specific structures the gasses are forming. Below is a closer look into some unique regions of the nebulous structure.

An Object in motion stays in motion

The Veil Nebula

Naturally, with little in space to impede the outward movement of the stellar remnants, the parts of the Veil Nebula are still drifting away from eachother at a staggering 1.5 million kilometers per hour. The Hubble Space Telescope was used to directly observe this expansion by comparing images taken from 1997 with images taken in 2015. Although this dispersion is moving very fast, an object at this scale that is millions of lightyears away will not appear to move all that much on such a small time scale. A video was created to illustrate movement that occured between 1997 and 2015: https://esahubble.org/videos/heic1520c/

Full image available here: https://flic.kr/p/2nBmBBR