This object is called the Veil Nebula.
I think because of its sort of diaphanous appearance here, you can see
through parts of it, but parts of it are very intricate,
like a veil.
And I think this is one of the more iconic
of Hubble images for sure, because it's absolutely gorgeous.
It's the result of a supernova explosion, a small piece
of the resulting nebula that came, that was caused by the supernova.
This is in the constellation Cygnus.
It's part of a very much more massive structure.
Supernovas tend to blow material out relatively spherically symmetric.
And you look at this and say, well, that's a linear feature.
You know, I don't I don't get it.
It's just that we're looking at a very tiny piece of
of this entire circle that's caused by the supernova.
In this image, we've backed off a little bit.
What you saw before was just a little piece of the area over here.
This bright star at the center is called 52 Cygni.
So that entire large circle is what we call the Cygnus Loop.
This is a area on the western side that is glowing very brightly.
There are other areas of the circle where material is glowing.
There's an Eastern veil and some other areas in the north and south.
This is perhaps the prettiest portion of the Cygnus Loop.
You can see why we've chosen to go in an image it.
The overall loop that we're talking about is something like 65 light years across.
It's absolutely huge on the sky.
The width of an individual filament like this is something way
smaller, comparable to the distance from the Earth to Pluto
is the scale you're seeing here.
This long, thin filament
glowing with all sorts of different colors, which means different
temperatures of material, different elements, giving off the light.
And you can just see that
there's so much energy and so much material in this little arc.
The process of this explosion sending out material
and having this material hit preexisting material
in the interstellar medium leads to all this complicated interaction.
And you're getting this afterglow.
You also have next to it
this region of star formation, where we have a very dark cloud.
You see very little background light getting through this area.
See a little bit of material
evaporating off this dark cloud caused by the bright stars below it.
But you have this area, the stellar nursery above to the left,
and you have this remnant of a star
in the process of dying from the supernova explosion right next to it.
So you have birth and death in the same image.
Take the highest resolution version of this image
and start blowing it up on your computer and looking at it.
You can find cool things all over the place.