With all of the recent excitement over seeing a supernova happen in real time in M101, what does one look like after 10,000 years? The Veil Nebula is a supernova remnant in Cygnus, about 2,400 light years away. The star this came from was probably 20 times the mass of the Sun, and this supernova would have been brighter than Venus, being visible during the day for months. This part of the nebula is at least twice the apparent diameter of the Moon in the sky. The Western part of the nebula is much larger, and I attempted to image it two years ago. The shell of this supernova is so thin that it’s only really observable edge on, which is why it appears as a ring and not a big bubble. This nebula is now about 130 light years in diameter.
The red color of the nebula is primarily Hydrogen-α, although there is Sulfur-II present that is a similar deep red. The cyan is Oxygen-III.
This image was taken with my large telescope, and it is a two-panel mosaic. I binned the individual exposures by two before registration and integration, approximately doubling the signal to noise ratio of each sub-exposure. Each panel is composed of 200 four minute exposures, giving 13 hours of exposure per panel. With the continuing inclement weather in June and July, it took a wait of 39 days to collect the 27 hours of data I desired.
