The Cat’s Eye Nebula, as photographed by the Hubble Telescope. Discovered in 1786, the Cat’s Eye Nebula lies 3,000 light years from Earth. Interestingly (for me anyway), the Cat’s Eye Nebula is only about 1000 years old (+/- 260 years).
A planetary nebula like this (which, confusingly, has nothing to do with planets) is a star near its last stage of life. A star begins as a cloud of molecular dust, settles into a main-sequence star like the Sun, expands to become a red giant, then contracts to a white dwarf, then dissipates as a planetary nebula, then explodes into a supernova. Somewhere in that sequence there are also red dwarfs and blue dwarfs.
You can see more amazing photos of deep space objects and such at NASA’s http://hubblesite.org/.
And here’s a trippy, catchy song about supernovas, by the band Oasis when they were still good: