cat's eye nebula, NASA Hubble image

Cat’s Eye Nebula, NGC 6543, a bright planetary Nebula.

Astronomy & Cosmos on Instagram: The Cat's Eye Nebula in Optical and X-ray

Cat’s eye Nebula

Scientists think they could forecast the fate of our Solar System in several billion years, after investigating within the constellation Virgo an unusual...

NGC 6543 cat eye nebula

Nobody expects the asteroid known as 7482 (1994 PC1) to hit Earth, but it's the closest it will come in the next two centuries, NASA projections show.

With its many layers of exploded dust and gas, the former star of NGC 6543 continues to mystify scientists.

I thought of giving it a shot at processing this magnificent stellar explosion. The preprocessed data are available on the Chandra site. I used the classical optical palette assignment : 502 N Blue, 505N Green and 658 Red while mixing the X-ray data with the Red channel instead of the Magenta that is usually used (the data isn't in the visible so it's a false color). Interestingly the the Chandra site mentions that diffuse X-ray emission are seen in about 30% of the planetary nebulas in the…