07/28/2024
This is a single channel image of the Western Veil Nebula that I took from the heart of Silicon Valley on Friday night. This image consists of 60 minutes of data from a single channel (hydrogen-alpha). Iād intended to also image two other channels to create a color image like the one I previously posted, but clouds rolled in around midnight forcing me to quit.
The Western Veil Nebula is a portion of a remnant left behind from a supernova explosion 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. A cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus, it has a radius of 50 light years and lies 2,400 light years from earth (one light-year = 9,460,730,472,580.8 km).
The source supernova was a star 20 times more massive than the Sun which exploded between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. At the time of the explosion, the supernova would have appeared brighter than Venus in the sky, and been visible in the daytime.
