Hubble Captures New View of Colorful Veil

Andrea Gianopoulos

February 28, 2025

A colorful, glowing nebula that reaches beyond the top and bottom of the image. This translucent cloud of gas holds wispy and thin filaments with hard edges in some places, and puffy and opaque in others. Blue, red, and yellow colors mix together, showing light emitted by different types of atoms in the hot gas. Scattered across the colorful nebula are bright and point-like foreground and background stars. The background is black.

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Hubble Captures New View of Colorful Veil

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image a supernova remnant called the Veil Nebula. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Sankrit

In this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, Hubble once again lifts the veil on a famous — and frequently photographed — supernova remnant: the Veil Nebula. The remnant of a star roughly 20 times as massive as the Sun that exploded about 10,000 years ago, the Veil Nebula is situated about 2,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Hubble images of this photogenic nebula were first taken in 1994 and 1997, and again in 2015.

This view combines images taken in three different filters by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, highlighting emission from hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen atoms. The image shows just a small fraction of the Veil Nebula; if you could see the entire nebula without the aid of a telescope, it would be as wide as six full Moons placed side-by-side.

Although this image captures the Veil Nebula at a single point in time, it helps researchers understand how the supernova remnant evolves over decades. Combining this snapshot with Hubble observations from 1994 will reveal the motion of individual knots and filaments of gas over that span of time, enhancing our understanding of this stunning nebula.

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