Close-up: The Cat’s Eye Nebula in Draco—A New View | Hubble Space Telescope

Close-up: The Cat’s Eye Nebula in Draco—A New View | Hubble Space Telescope

This is a new Hubble image of one of the most visually intricate remnants of a dying star—the Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543. This extraordinary planetary nebula has captivated astronomers for decades with its elaborate and multilayered structure. Observations with the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission place the nebula at a distance of 4,400 light years away.

Planetary nebulae, so-called because of their round shape when viewed through early telescopes, are in fact expanding gas thrown off by stars in their final stages of evolution. It was the Cat’s Eye Nebula itself where this fact was first discovered in 1864—examining the spectrum of its light reveals the emission from individual molecules that is characteristic of a gas, distinguishing planetary nebulae from stars and galaxies.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope also expanded our understanding of planetary nebulae; its detailed images showed that the simple, circular appearance of a planetary nebula seen from the ground belies a very complex morphology. This was particularly true of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, where Hubble’s images in 1995 revealed never-before-seen structures that broadened our understanding of how planetary nebulae come to be.

This new Hubble image shows the nebula's core filled with billowing gas via the High Resolution Channel sub-instrument on its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). This instrument is optimized for capturing very sharp images of fine details in a small area, such as the complex features here. The data presents a mixture of concentric shells, jets of high-speed gas and dense knots sculpted by shock interactions. These structures are believed to record episodic mass loss from the dying star at the nebula’s center, creating a  record of its final stages.

A portion of this data was used in a previous image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, released in 2004. Previously unused data from ACS is combined with the latest processing techniques to create this new image, the sharpest so far.

Image Description: An image of the center of a planetary nebula. A blue star sits at the center within a series of overlapping, translucent bubbles of gas. The bubbles have a complex, filamentary structure. The two largest bubbles overlap halfway, creating an eye-like shape with the star at the center. Jets of high-speed gas point out of the top and bottom of the nebula. Faint, concentric circles of gas also surround the star, out beyond the bubbles.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Z. Tsvetanov

Duration: 30 seconds
Release Date: March 3, 2026

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