'Witch's Broom' The Western Veil Nebula - NGC6960

Image taken with the PIRATE Telescope on Mount Teide - Canary Islands. Credit -The Autonomous Telescope. Open University -  telescope.org.

The image was taken using sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen filters. The sulphur II was pasted into the red channel, the hydrogen alpha into the green channel and the Oxygen III into the blue channel. (The Hubble Palette)

'The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop (radio source W78, or Sharpless 103), a large but relatively faint supernova remnant. The source supernova exploded circa 3,000 BC to 6,000 BC, and the remnants have since expanded to cover an area roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, or 36 times the area, of the full moon). The distance to the nebula is not precisely known, but Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) data supports a distance of about 1,470 light-years.^'
Credit -Wikipedia

We saw this nebula for the first time about two years ago. We were enjoying the great hospitality and  company of Olly and Monique at Les Granges in the South of France. We balanced on a step ladder to look into the eyepiece of  Olly's monster Dobsonian Reflector. Wow what a sight! I nearly fell off the step ladder.