The Veil Nebula — Mosaic in Progress
A living entry: half of a 10,000-year-old explosion, filling in
What you're looking at
The Veil is the Cygnus Loop: the expanding shell of a star that exploded about 10,000 years ago, roughly 2,400 light-years away. The blast wave is still running outward through thin interstellar gas, and where it hits denser clumps the shocked gas glows, red from hydrogen, teal from oxygen.
The full loop is about three degrees across, six full moons, so no single frame of a small telescope holds it. The arcs that have names, the Eastern Veil, the Western Veil and Pickering’s Triangle, are just the brightest stretches of one continuous ring.
With the Crab and the Jellyfish, it completes the journal’s supernova timeline: the Crab at 1,000 years, compact and still electric; the Veil at 10,000, spread across the sky; the Jellyfish at 30,000 or more, dissolving into the clouds it hit.
The lesson
This is half a picture, published on purpose. The gaps are exactly where the next nights go, and you can see the plan in the empty sky.
It took six sessions on two telescopes to get here, most of them shot before I knew they’d end up as one image. The early frames weren’t wasted; they were inventory, waiting for a plan big enough to use them.
Most long projects look like this from the inside. Do the next panel.
One photo. One lesson.
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Object data
- Object
- The Cygnus Loop (NGC 6960, 6992/6995, Pickering’s Triangle)
- Constellation
- Cygnus
- Type
- Supernova remnant
- Age
- ~10,000 years
- Frames so far
- 6 (4 × S50 Pro, 2 × S50), 557 minutes
- Status
- LIVING ENTRY — northern half done; 4 panels to go
