God's Eye II

A few months ago, I posted about a picture that had been sent to me that the writer claimed was a rare astronomical event called the Eye Of God.

See God's Eye for further information on that.

Today I was looking at recent entries on the Astronomy Picture Of The Day website and found another possibility for the Eye of God.

Here is the original Eye of God photo that was sent to me.























Here is a photo of the Cat's Eye Nebula, the APOD website's entry for March 22, 2008:
















Here is the info posted along with the photo:

Staring across interstellar space, the alluring Cat's Eye Nebula lies three thousand light-years from Earth. One of the most famous planetary nebulae in the sky, the Cat's Eye (NGC 6543) is over half a light-year across and represents a final, brief yet glorious phase in the life of a sun-like star. This nebula's dying central star may have produced the simple, outer pattern of dusty concentric shells by shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. But the formation of the beautiful, more complex inner structures is not well understood. Here, Hubble Space Telescope archival image data has been reprocessed to create another look the cosmic cat's eye. Compared to well-known Hubble pictures, the alternative processing strives to sharpen and improve the visiblility of details in light and dark areas of the nebula and also applies a more complex color palette. Of course, gazing into the Cat's Eye, astronomers may well be seeing the fate of our Sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution ... in about 5 billion years.


Update July 3, 2009:

As the anonymous commenter on the first "Gods's Eye" post said (see link at top), the first picture is of the Helix Nebula, NGC7293!

Here is an article on it at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_Nebula

And, another from Astronomy Picture of the Day that was not available at the time I first posted this article: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090303.html