← Back to dex
Epic nebula 53 EP

Eastern Veil

RA 314.2948° · Dec 31.2352° · openngc

Real photograph of Eastern Veil 📷 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

· 5 badges
53 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Supernova remnant +26
  • Nebula +8
  • Has a proper name +8
  • Bright deep-sky object +6
  • Big on the sky +5
Total score 53

25 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Nebula · +8
  • Bright deep-sky object · +6
  • Has a proper name · +8
  • Supernova remnant · +26
  • Big on the sky · +5

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
Network Nebula
constellation
Cyg
dso type
SNR
mag
7
name
Eastern Veil
named
yes
size arcmin
12

Nearby objects

About Eastern Veil

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

Like any astronomical target, Eastern Veil 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 Eastern Veil is an epic nebula

Eastern Veil scores 53 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 25 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Nebula, Bright deep-sky object, Has a proper name, Supernova remnant and Big on the sky — 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.