The Veil Nebula, photographed here in its western section, is a complex of branching ionised gas — oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur — in Cygnus, formed by a supernova explosion about fifteen thousand years ago. The star that produced it was tens of times more massive than the Sun.
Among its structures stands out the famous "Witch's Broom", with the star 52 Cygni at its centre — which has nothing to do with the nebula: it lies much closer to us and merely happens to fall along the same line of sight.
What you see is not the gas of the explosion itself but interstellar material that the shock wave is still crossing and heating, to this day, at more than three hundred kilometres per second. The whole supernova remnant covers an area of sky six times larger than the full Moon.
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