NGC6992

Most stars end their existence rather quietly, emitting their outer shells into space, with a dense core slowly cooling down as a so-called White Dwarf. Those stars containing substantially more matter than our sun, however, die in a spectacular explosion, which for days and weeks may be brighter than the light of all the billions of stars in a whole galaxy.

Like a veil of high clouds, the remnants of such a Supernova cover a large region in the constellation Cygnus. They have drifted far apart because the event itself occured several thousand years ago.