The nebula is a cloud of glowing gas and is the leftover debris of an exploded star. The nebula is actually a bubble, but only along the edges is it thick enough for use to see. This causes the bubble to appear as a ring in space when we look at it. The star in the very center of the nebula is the remaining core of the original star that exploded.

This is one of my very first astro-photos. It was taken with my first telescope, a Celestron C8 SCT on a CG-5 mount. This is an unguided image so the raw frame exposures are quite short, a mere 20 seconds. There aren't very many exposures either so the entire integration time is only a little over 5 minutes.

A Nikon D90 DSLR camera was used for for this one. At the time I didn't know anything about color balancing and as a result the blue came out very bright. But only a fringe of red appeared. Still, it did show the central star.

And considering my inexperience and the sort of gear I was using, the fact that I could get any sort of picture at all was very encouraging.