Ring Nebula

The outer layers of a dying star, cast off in a barrel-shaped shell that we see almost end on, so it looks like a ring.

The picture hangs at that distance facing Earth, as large as it is on the sky; how deep the object is cannot be seen, so it is flat.

Taken by

Hubble Space Telescope

Picture spans

about 1.6 ly

From the Sun

2,570 light-years

RA / Dec

283.40° / 33.03°

Credit

NASA, ESA, and C. Robert O’Dell (Vanderbilt University).

The Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula in the northern constellation of Lyra, about mid-way between the prominent stars Beta and Gamma Lyrae. It is also catalogued as Messier 57, M57 and NGC 6720. The nebula was discovered by Charles Messier in 1779. It has an apparent visual magnitude of 8.8, which is too faint to be visible with the naked eye, but it can be readily observed with a small telescope.

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