ExploraTour: A Peek into the Lives of the Stars
A Beautiful Example of a Planetary Nebula.
This is an picture of the "Cat's Eye" nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The gas clouds, that you see, are the outer layers of a star, blown off during the final stages of its life some thousand years ago (during the time when Kings and their armies of Knights ruled in Medieval Europe).
What's left of the original star? It is the white dwarf at the center of the gas cloud.