STScI

A nebula in Cygnus

Very massive stars can show a very strong mass loss in the final stage of their evolution. Here large amounts of stellar stellar matter and the core of the formerly massive star is exposed. Such stars are called Wolf-Rayet stars, after the French astronomers the French astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet.

The ejected and illuminated gas is illuminated by the Wolf-Rayet star WR136 The emission nebula NGC 6888 (Crecent Nebula) in the constellation of Cygnus is 4700 light-years away.

The image was taken with a telescope of only 107 mm aperture and a total exposure time of almost 2 hours.

Text and imgae: Axel Schmidt

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