Cats Eye Nebula, NGC 6543, Hubble Version

Cat’s Eye Nebula, NGC 6543  Staring across interstellar space, the Cat’s Eye nebula lies three thousand light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. A classic planetary nebula, the Cat’s Eye (NGC 6543) represents a final, brief period in the life of a sun-like star. This nebula’s dying central star may have produced the simple, outer pattern of several blue concentric shells  here by eliminating outer layers in a series of regular events. But the formation of the beautiful, more complex inner structures is not well understood. Seen so clearly in this Hubble Space Telescope image, the truly cosmic eye is over half a light-year across and is less than 1 arc minute in the sky which is 1/30 of the size of the full moon. Gazing into the Cat’s Eye, astronomers may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary phase of evolution … in about 5 billion years. The image is a false color image using narrowband filters with the red color coming from Sulfur emission and blue coming from two Oxygen emission lines at 502nm and 375nm. While not obvious there is green mixed in the image coming from Hydrogen emission.