Spaghetti Nebula

Sh2-240 – The Spaghetti Nebula (6-Panel Mosaic)

Sh2-240, better known as the Spaghetti Nebula, is one of those objects that quietly humbles you. It’s the remnant of a massive star that exploded roughly 40,000 years ago, and what’s left behind isn’t a neat shell or a dramatic bubble — it’s a tangled, shredded web of shock fronts slowly fading into interstellar space.

This image is my first mosaic of Sh2-240, captured as a 6-panel mosaic. There was simply no other way to approach it. On the sky, this remnant spans close to 3 degrees, which translates to about six full Moons placed side by side. That scale is hard to grasp until you actually try to frame it and realize just how much sky it eats.

I find this object especially honest. It’s faint, filamentary, and completely unforgiving in processing. Push the data too hard and the structure collapses. Treat it with restraint and patience, and it just keeps revealing more — thin strands, overlapping arcs, and subtle gradients that feel more like archaeology than photography.

What I enjoy most about Sh2-240 is that it doesn’t try to impress at first glance. It rewards time. Both at the telescope and later at the screen, it invites you to slow down and really look. Zoom in and you’ll notice there’s almost no empty space at all — just layer upon layer of an ancient explosion still echoing through the galaxy.

It’s often nicknamed the Spaghetti Nebula as a joke, but in reality this is stellar death stretched across six Moons of sky, quietly cooling, and slowly dissolving back into the Milky Way.