Veil Nebula
What is Veil Nebula?
Nebulae· Distance 2,400 ly. The vast remnant of a supernova that exploded about 20,000 years ago, its shock wave still lighting up interstellar gas. Gossamer filaments spread across six Moon-widths beneath the wing of Cygnus.
📍 Visible from where you are right now — computed in your browser
bearing · altitude · rise time · best time tonight
Where Veil Nebula is in your sky right now: https://nowsky.org/solar/sky?sel=veil nebula — location and time set automatically, no login.
Its place in the sky
A nebula, in the direction of Cygnus, spanning about 180 arcminutes of sky — 5.8 times the width of the full Moon.
Distance and scale
| Distance | ~2,400 ly |
|---|---|
| Size | ~110 ly (6 full Moons) |
| Type | supernova remnant |
| Constellation | Cygnus |
Figures are representative approximations. Source: compiled from NASA and IAU public data.
Discovery and name
Found by William Herschel in 1784 — the still-expanding lace of a supernova 10,000 years ago.
Frequently asked
- How far is Veil Nebula from Earth?
- ~2,400 ly.
- What kind of object is Veil Nebula?
- supernova remnant.
- Where in the sky is Veil Nebula?
- In the direction of Cygnus.
- Where is Veil Nebula in the sky right now?
- Open the sky view for your location and time and it shows the position in the sky right now.
The Witch's Broom — the Veil's western piece and the star in front
The western piece of the Veil, NGC 6960, is called the Witch's Broom. Long thin filaments hang like bristles, and the 4th-magnitude star 52 Cygni pierces the middle so that in photographs it seems to light the nebula. It has nothing to do with it — a foreground star 200 light-years away that happens to lie in the same direction, while the nebula is more than ten times farther.
The Veil shines not by starlight but by shock. Debris from the explosion 20,000 years ago still ploughs into interstellar gas at over 100 km/s, and hydrogen and oxygen heated at the collision front glow red and blue. The filaments are thread-thin because we see a thin shell of shock edge-on, and comparing Hubble images of the same spot from 1997 and 2015 shows the filaments visibly shifted in eighteen years.
The nebula in depth
The Veil Nebula is a supernova remnant about 2,400 light-years away in Cygnus. Some 110 light-years across, it spans six full-Moon widths of sky and appears as an eastern arc (NGC 6992), a western arc (NGC 6960) and fragments between them. The western arc runs straight through the bright star 52 Cygni, earning it the nickname "Witch's Broom".
The star that exploded is thought to have had about 20 times the Sun's mass, and at the moment of the blast it would have shone as bright as a crescent Moon, visible by day. What glows now is not stellar debris but interstellar gas ionized by a shock wave still racing outward at over 100 km/s. Hubble's images show layers of red hydrogen, green and blue oxygen that trace the temperature jump across the shock.
In the Sky view, look south of Gienah (Epsilon Cygni), the star at the tip of the Swan's southern wing, on summer evenings. Its surface brightness is too low for the naked eye, but from a dark site an O-III filter on binoculars or a telescope reveals astonishingly fine threads. Without a filter it is nearly lost from suburban skies.
Related
Figures are representative approximations. Simulated positions use J2000 mean elements.