Floating within the rich star fields of Cygnus, NGC 6894 is a faint planetary nebula roughly 1,800 light-years away. The nebula’s nearly perfect circular shell marks the final breath of a dying sunlike star, now collapsed into a white dwarf at its center. Surrounding filaments of hydrogen and oxygen trace shock fronts where stellar winds interact with earlier ejected gas, creating the glowing sphere seen in the image.

Recent deep exposures have revealed that NGC 6894 is not an isolated bubble, but rather connected to a faint extended hydrogen tail stretching several arcminutes southward, likely formed as the nebula drifts through the interstellar medium. This feature shows that the nebula’s ejected material continues to shape and be shaped by its galactic environment, offering a glimpse of stellar death in motion amid the crowded Milky Way.