NGC 6543 or The Cat's Eye Nebula is a small, very bright planetary nebula found in the northern constellation Draco and 3300 light-years from Earth. My image may give the false impression that it is very large, however, The Cat's Eye is actually the bright core of a much larger complex but you really need a much larger telescope than I have to do it justice. It formed about 1000 years ago when a hot bright central star blew its outer layers into a much fainter region of gas believed to have formed from much earlier expulsions between 50,000 and 90,000 years ago. The entire region is three light-years across.
I have been wanting to do The Cat's Eye or at least the outer region for quite some time but I also wanted to wait until I had a big enough scope to make it worthwhile. I still ended up cropping quite a bit but if I did with the refractor I would have had to crop it 4x more just to see a blue blotch.
I tried to bring out some of the central detail of NGC 6543 but it is so much brighter than the faint outer region that it makes it very difficult. I took shorter exposures thinking I would stack them but there were not many stars bright enough for the stacking programs to register. I did some other 'stuff' to bring out some of the central detail and then focused on the rest of the faint regions. I really love the blue structure of the outer region. I also like the multiple red blips that are located within the translucent blue region and just outside on the left. I purposely offset the nebula to the left as I also wanted to show the barred spiral galaxy NGC 6552 on the right. It is pretty small in my image but it was there.
There really was not that many stars in this region so only one round of star reduction was necessary. I however use a different method courtesy of Dark Archon and @Adam Block which seemed to work really well!
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