                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
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                    written by a professional astronomer.

                              2026 September 24

                        The Ghosts of Five Supernovas
           Image Credit & Copyright: Stephane Vetter, Yann Sainty
             Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)

   Explanation: The ghosts of five supernovas haunt this extraordinary
   image. It was acquired at Oukaïmeden Observatory in Morocco with
   approximately 200 hours of observations and shows a large patch of the
   sky, equivalent to the area of one thousand full moons tiled together,
   in the constellation of Auriga (the charioteer). From left to right,
   the five supernova remnants visible across the field are G181.1+9.5,
   G182.4+4.3, G179.0+2.6, G180.0−1.7 (Sh2-240, the Spaghetti Nebula), and
   G178.2−4.2. They are highlighted in the annotated image, together with
   open cluster M37 and the Tadpole Nebula. As each explosion expanded
   into space, it created a growing shell of shocked gas and delicate
   filamentary structures shown in red (hydrogen) and blue (oxygen),
   respectively. These ancient stellar explosions happened independently;
   they are at various distances up to about several thousands of
   light-years away from Earth and have estimated ages up to tens of
   thousands of years old. Early humans may have witnessed them as bright
   new stars, fading over weeks or months.

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       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
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