This famous planetary nebula is located 6000 light years away in the constellation of Gemini at a declination of +21 degrees. It is a bright magnitude 9.2 PN which spans 1 arc-minute in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of 1.5 light years.
This PN has the distinction of having 2 former nicknames – Eskimo Nebula and Clownface Nebula – which now have been deprecated because they are offensive to some people.
Two distinct regions - inner and outer - are shown in this image. The strong winds of ejected particles from the central dying progenitor star creates the interesting structure in both regions.
The inner region is our end-on view of one of the 2 bi-polar lobes, expanding towards us. The arcs are the outlines of "bubbles" of gas from the expanding gas fronts.
The outer region is the large equatorial disk, which features the spoked appearance of comet-shaped gas filaments. These filaments form as the fast stellar wind barrels through the cooler disk of dust and gas that were previously ejected slowly by the star in its previous phase. I like the subtle color tones of red and orange cometary filaments that show up both in my image and in the Hubble image.
This object is the 39th entry in the
Caldwell catalog.
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