← Back to dex
Anomaly nebula 82 EP

Veil Nebula

RA 311.4924° · Dec 30.5951° · openngc

Real photograph of Veil Nebula 📷 Real photo
Ken Crawford (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Loading sky survey…
🌌 View in 3D star map
Tonight’s visibility

Computing the sky for your location…

Score breakdown

· 6 badges
82 pts · Anomaly
Anomaly 120 pts → Mythic
  • Supernova remnant +26
  • The Veil Nebula +22
  • Bigger on the sky than the full Moon +12
  • Nebula +8
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Bright deep-sky object +6
Total score 82

38 more points to reach Mythic.

Badges

  • Nebula · +8
  • Bright deep-sky object · +6
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • Supernova remnant · +26
  • Bigger on the sky than the full Moon · +12
  • The Veil Nebula · +22

Trivia

What it actually is

  • What it actually is. A supernova remnant: the shredded corpse of an exploded star, still tearing outwards through interstellar space at thousands of kilometres a second.

Sense of scale

  • Sense of scale. Explosions like this forged most of the calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood, then flung it out to be recycled.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 7 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Cygnus.
  • Northern sky. It rides the northern half of the sky — an easier target the further north you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around August — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Its true colour. Its tangled filaments glow in the colours of shock-heated gas, and it radiates in X-rays and radio as well as light.

What's in a name

  • Named. Notable enough to have earned a proper name, not just a catalogue number.

How we came to know it

  • The New General Catalogue. Its NGC number comes from J. L. E. Dreyer's 1888 catalogue, itself built on decades of sky sweeps by William Herschel and his sister Caroline.

Properties

aliases
Filamentary Nebula, Western Veil
constellation
Cyg
dso type
SNR
mag
7
name
Veil Nebula
named
yes
size arcmin
210

Nearby objects

About Veil Nebula

Veil Nebula is an anomaly nebula. It sits in the constellation Cyg and shines at apparent magnitude 7.

A supernova remnant: the shredded corpse of an exploded star, still tearing outwards through interstellar space at thousands of kilometres a second.

How to see it

Look for Veil Nebula in the constellation Cyg. At apparent magnitude 7, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, Veil Nebula is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.

Why Veil Nebula is an anomaly nebula

Veil Nebula scores 82 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the anomaly tier. Another 38 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 6 science badges — Nebula, Bright deep-sky object, Has a proper name, Supernova remnant, Bigger on the sky than the full Moon and The Veil Nebula — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.