The Eastern Veil nebula
© 2015 Eric Marlatt
This was shot about 10 miles east of Flag near the Winona ext off I-40, even with Flagstaff being a dark sky city it's well worth taking short trips out for very dark skies for imaging. This image was captured through an Orion EON 130mm telescope, an AP Mach1 mount, and a modified Canon T3i camera, and surrounded by howling coyotes that make sure I'm awake. It has an exposure time around 2 hours. Image processing was done in Pixinsight to bring out all the detail buried deep in the image.
Eric Marlatt
The following was retrieved from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_Nebula on November 19, 2015
"The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop (radio source W78, or Sharpless 103), a large but relatively faint supernova remnant. The source supernova exploded some 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, and the remnants have since expanded to cover an area roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, or 36 times the area, of the full moon). The distance to the nebula is not precisely known, but Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) data supports a distance of about 1,470 light-years.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured several images of the nebula. The analysis of the emissions from the nebula indicate the presence of oxygen, sulfur, and hydrogen. This is also one of the largest, brightest features in the x-ray sky.
September 24, 2015 new images and videos of the Veil Nebula were released, with an explanation of the images."
The license terms of this written work from Wikipedia may be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/