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.

From a dark-sky site in Novara, Italy, this high-resolution narrowband image captures the famous Ring Nebula (M57) in remarkable detail. Located about 2,300 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, M57 is a planetary nebula, the glowing shell of ionized gas ejected by a dying Sun-like star. The well-known central ring glows in blue-green hues from doubly ionized oxygen (OIII), while deep hydrogen-alpha (Hα) imaging reveals an extended reddish halo of previously ejected material.

This image is the result of nearly 29 hours of total exposure, with 13 hours and 40 minutes in Hα and 15 hours and 15 minutes in OIII, using individual 900-second subframes. The data unveils delicate filamentary structures in the nebula’s outer regions, offering insight into the star’s complex mass-loss history and interaction with the interstellar medium.