Infrared Ring Nebula

The classic appearance of the popular Ring Nebula (aka M57) is understood to be due to perspective - our view from planet Earth looks down the center of a roughly barrel-shaped cloud of gas. But graceful looping structures are seen to extend even beyond the Ring Nebula's familiar central regions in this false-color infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope . Of course in this well-studied example of a planetary nebula , the glowing material does not come from planets. Instead, the gaseous shroud represents outer layers expelled from a dying, sun-like star. By chance, spiral galaxy IC 1296 is also visible in the upper right of this Spitzer view toward the constellation Lyra . The central ring of the Ring Nebula is about one light-year across and 2,000 light-years away. However, galaxy IC 1296 much bigger and hence farther away ... about 200 million light-years distant.