The Crescent, the Tulip, and WR-134

This wide field captures a particularly crowded corner of the sky, in the constellation of Cygnus: several nebulae, one of the rarest kinds of star, and dozens of more discreet objects all share the frame. A detail that matters to me: unlike most of my shots, this one was taken from Belgium, in Ramillies.

The most striking shape, at the upper left, is the Crescent Nebula. It is a shell of gas, blown by the winds of a dying star of a rare kind, known as Wolf-Rayet: a colossal star, near the end of its life, hurling its outer layers outward at great speed. It lies about 5,000 light-years away.

Far to the right blooms the Tulip (Sh2-101), a cloud of hydrogen whose shape evokes the flower, some 6,000 light-years away. Lower down, toward the centre, watches another Wolf-Rayet, WR-134: a star so hot and so luminous that it shines like 400,000 suns, surrounded by a bubble of gas sculpted by its wind. The very faint Soap Bubble, for its part, hides just below the Crescent, slightly to the left.

A word about the colours: the image was taken through a filter that keeps only the light of two gases. The blue is oxygen; the golden and orange tones are hydrogen.