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Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light must suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was an exploding star and record the colorful expanding cloud as the Veil Nebula. The supernova remnant lies about 1400 light-years away towards the constellation of Cygnus. This supernova remnant actually spans over four times the angular size of the full Moon. The bright star 52 Cygnus is visible with the unaided eye from a dark location but unrelated to the ancient supernova. (Text adapted from Astronomy Picture of the Day)
This image is a composite from black and white images taken with the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch (1.2-meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS II). The images were recorded on two glass photographic plates - one sensitive to red light and the other to blue and later they were digitized. Credit: Caltech, Palomar Observatory, Digitized Sky Survey. In order to produce the color image
seen here, I worked with a total of 52 different
frames, 26 for each color band, coming from 4 different plates taken
between 1988 and 1995.
Original file is 15,158x15,960 pixels with a resolution of about 1 arcsec per pixel. The image show an area of sky large 4,2° x 4,4° (for
comparison, the full-Moon is about 0,5° in diameter). Other images of the same celestial field found online
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