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Cat's Eye Nebula
Details
The Cat's Eye Nebula is a planetary nebula in Draco whose bright inner core folds shells, jets, and dense knots around a dying central star. Hubble resolves that compact center as a layered record of repeated mass loss, distinct from the much fainter halo beyond it.
The Cat's Eye Nebula is often remembered for looking uncannily designed, but its bright inner core is the aftermath of a star shedding its outer layers in successive episodes. In Hubble's close view, the nebula stops reading as a simple glowing shell and becomes a dense weave of bubbles, knots, and narrow jets around the exposed central star.
That structure matters because it preserves process, not ornament. The overlapping shells and shock-shaped features suggest that the outflow changed over time, as slower material was overtaken and carved by later, faster winds.
Cat's Eye is therefore one of the clearest compact records of how planetary nebulae become complicated. Instead of fading into a smooth sphere, this dying star left behind a remnant whose geometry still carries the history of its final instability.
1,411billion km0.15ly
Key facts
- Category
- Nebulae
- Object class
- Planetary nebula
- Host
- Milky Way
- Scale fact
- 3,800 billion km0.4 lymaximum extent
- Composition
- Ionized gas, dust, stellar ejecta
- Temperature
- ~8,000 K ionized gas
Scale context
Where Cat's Eye Nebula sits on the full axis
By size on the journey, Cat's Eye Nebula sits between NGC 7027 and Homunculus Nebula. The band below compares Cat's Eye Nebula with nearby Planetary nebula objects so the size jump stays easy to read.
Shared physical scale
3.64ly
Together, these objects make the size change around Cat's Eye Nebula easy to compare at a glance.
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.