Lucky Cat's Eye

This pair of images shows the Cat's Eye Nebula taken with the 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory. On the top is a conventional image, and on the bottom is one produced using the "lucky imaging technique." That technique relies on a high-speed camera that takes as many as 20 images per second and a computer to sift out the sharpest of the bunch and combine them into a final view. The nebula is about 3,000 light-years in distance from Earth, and the lucky imaging view shows filaments that are a few light-hours wide--the distance that light travels in a few hours.