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NGC 6543 · Planetary Nebula
Cat's Eye Nebula
One of the most structurally complex planetary nebulae known — an onion of concentric shells around a dying Sun-like star. Its emission-line spectrum, recorded by William Huggins in 1864, was the first proof that nebulae are gaseous rather than unresolved star clusters.
NGC 6543 is what our Sun is destined to become. When a star of around one solar mass exhausts the helium in its core, it sheds its outer layers in a series of slow stellar winds before the exposed hot core ionizes the cast-off gas. The result is the brief (~10,000 year) glow of a planetary nebula.
The Cat's Eye is unusual for its intricate, almost mechanical-looking inner structure: nested ellipses, jet-like outflows, and at least eleven concentric shells in its faint outer halo, each marking a thermal pulse from the dying central star roughly 1,500 years apart. Hubble Space Telescope imagery of NGC 6543 in the 1990s became some of the most reproduced astronomical photographs of the era.
Visually it is small and bright — a turquoise disc through any modest telescope — which makes it well suited to long focal-length imaging. The inner core saturates quickly, so HDR composites combining short and long exposures reveal both the bright inner shells and the much fainter halo simultaneously.
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