Zoom Into Veil Nebula

This video opens with a backyard view of the nighttime sky centered on the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. We zoom into a vast donut-shaped feature called the Veil Nebula. It is the tattered expanding bubble of debris from a star that exploded about 8,000 years ago. The bubble has expanded to a diameter of roughly 110 light-years. Our zoom continues down to a two-light-year-wide segment of the nebula as photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble resolves tangled rope-like filaments of glowing gases.

Credits:

NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI); Acknowledgment: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), Digitized Sky Survey ((DSS) STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska, Anchorage) and WIYN/NOAO/AURA/NSF, and A. Fujii