Hubble and Euclid capture the final act of a dying star — and it’s glorious: Space photo of the week
Quick facts
What is this : Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543).
Where it is: 4,300 light years from Earth, in the constellation Draco.
When it was shared: March 3, 2026.
These stunning cosmic shots show distorted bright rings of blue, orange and red gas receding from a dying star. Against a sea of galaxies and stars, this image highlights the famous Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543.
As calm and beautiful as it may seem, don’t be fooled. This picturesque nebula was shaped by the messy interaction between the star’s intense winds, outer layers and powerful jets, creating its complex eye-like structure.
Located approximately 4,300 light-years from Earth, “Cat’s Eye” is a planetary nebula: an expanding cloud of glowing gas expelled by a low-to-medium mass star that has reached the final stages of its life. Unlike more massive stars, which die in violent supernova explosions, the central star gently shed its outer layers into space, creating beautiful, complex shells of discarded material.
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These spectacular images were created using observations from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope and Euclid Space Telescope.
The wide-field view of Euclid, captured in visible and near-infrared light, shows faint arcs and delicate filaments of gas surrounding the bright central region. These wispy structures appear to be flying offstage, into space, and are thought to have been expelled during an earlier stage of the star’s death, before the outer layers that formed the main nebula were lost.
Hubble captured the smallest details of the nebula’s bright central region. This close view was taken in visible light and shows a dead but bright star surrounded by white bubbles and blue gas loops. Using its advanced survey camera, Hubble revealed even finer and more complex details at the nebula’s core, including the complexity of the gas bubbles and the delicate filamentary structures embedded within those bubbles.
These finer details serve as the nebula’s “fossil record,” according to an ESA study. statement. Each gas bubble corresponds to an episode of mass loss from the dying star. In the image, these bubbles are followed by concentric circles or rings in a brown halo; each ring marks the limit of the bubbles. Additionally, the data reveals high-speed, energetic jets of gas, shown in pink, shooting out from the top and bottom of the nebula. There are also dense knots formed by the shock interactions of high-speed jets and slowly expanding ejected material.
While Hubble captures unprecedented detail of the dying star’s bright nest and its immediate surroundings, Euclid reveals the faint arcs and filaments of colored gas a little farther away from the nebula, as well as the broader cosmic landscape dotted with distant galaxies. Together, they present an almost cinematic vision of a dying star’s final act.
