This image is part of the Eastern Veil Nebula, or NGC 6992, and it was obtained using the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope. It is a three-colour composite made from data collected using
filters to isolate the light emitted by hydrogen alpha (H-alpha), doubly ionised oxygen (OIII) and ionised sulfur (SII) atoms, and coded in the image as red, green and blue respectively.
Credit: D. López (IAC). [ JPEG | TIFF | PDF (with text) ]
The Veil Nebula is part of the Cygnus Loop which comprises several NGC objects. Shown here is NGC 6992 in the Eastern Veil. The Veil Nebula is a faint supernova remnant that exploded some
5000 years ago, and since then it has been expanding on the sky to
cover some 3 degrees. Its fine and intrincated filaments are attributed to a thin shock wave propagating into space and seen edge-on.
This image was obtained and processed by members of the IAC astrophotography group (A. Oscoz, D. López, P. Rodríguez-Gil and L. Chinarro).