Fast facts
What it is: The Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543).
Where is it: 4300 light years away from Earth, in the constellation Draco.
When it was shared: March 3, 2026.
These stunning cosmic images show distorted glowing rings of blue, orange and red gas hurtling away from a dying star. Set against a sea of galaxies and stars, this image shows the famous Cat’s Eye Nebula, otherwise known as NGC 6543.
As calm and beautiful as it appears, don’t be fooled. This scenic nebula was shaped by the messy interplay of the star’s intense winds, outer layers, and powerful jets, creating its intricate, eye-like structure.
Located about 4,300 light-years from Earth, “Cat’s Eye” is a planetary nebula – an expanding cloud of glowing gas ejected by a low- to intermediate-mass star that has reached the final stages of its life. Unlike more massive stars, which die in violent supernova explosions, the central star has carefully shed its outer layers into space, creating beautiful and complex shells of discarded material.
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These spectacular images were created using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid Space Telescope.
Euclid’s wide-field view, captured in visible and near-infrared light, shows faint arcs and delicate gas filaments surrounding the bright central region. These whippy structures appear to fly from the scene, out into space, and are thought to have been ejected during an earlier stage of the star’s death, before the outer layers were ejected to form the main nebula.
Hubble has captured the fine details of the bright central region of the nebula. This close up was taken with visible light and shows a dead but bright star surrounded by white bubbles and blue loops of gas. Using the Advanced Camera for Surveys, Hubble has revealed even finer, intricate details at the heart of the nebula, including the complexity of gas bubbles and delicate filamentary structures embedded in those bubbles.
These finer details act as a “fossil record” of the nebula, according to an ESA statement. Each gas bubble corresponds to an episode of mass loss by the dying star. In the image, these bubbles are followed by concentric circles or rings within a brown halo; each ring marks the boundary of the bubbles. Furthermore, the data reveal jets of energetic and high-velocity gas, shown in pink, shooting out from the top and bottom of the nebula. There are also dense knots formed by shock interactions of high-speed jets and slowly expanding ejecta.
While Hubble captures the exquisite detail of the dying star’s bright nest and its immediate surroundings, Euclid reveals the faint arcs and colorful filaments of gas a little further out in the nebula, along with the wider cosmic landscape dotted with distant galaxies. Together they present an almost cinematic view of the final act of a dying star.
