Twenty-six years after Hubble first framed it in warm orange light, planetary nebula NGC 2392 has a new portrait — and this one sees through the fur. On August 10, 2026, NASA released James Webb Space Telescope images of the object nicknamed the "Lion Nebula," captured with Webb's NIRCam and MIRI instruments, exposing structural detail in the nebula's gas and dust that Hubble's visible-light optics simply could not register.
The nickname comes from Hubble's 2000 image, in which a bright central star sat inside a mane-like ring of orange filaments, giving the object a distinctly leonine face. Webb's infrared view tells a more technical story: instead of a uniform mane, the telescope resolves compact clumps of dust, each trailing a comet-like tail where it shields the material behind it from the star's radiation, embedded in a diffuse haze of ionized gas.
A Dying Star's Last Exhale
NGC 2392 is what remains of a low-mass, oxygen-rich star in its terminal phase. According to NASA's release, the star became unstable and pulsated, shedding its outer layers in a process that took several thousand years to build the nebula's current shells of gas and dust. What's left at the center is a white dwarf — the exposed, superheated core of the former star — and it is doing double duty. Its radiation is pushing the expanding bubble of gas outward, and simultaneously destroying the very dust clumps that give the nebula its structure, according to NASA's release.
PetaPixel's coverage frames that central object in the same visual terms as the original nickname: if the nebula is a lion's face, the white dwarf is its "button nose" — a small, dense, brilliant point anchoring a much larger, more chaotic structure of expelled stellar material.
Why Infrared Sees What Visible Light Can't
Hubble's 2000 images relied on visible-light filters, which are effective at tracing ionized gas glowing at specific wavelengths but largely blind to cooler dust and to gas obscured behind denser clumps. Webb's NIRCam and MIRI instruments operate in near- and mid-infrared, wavelengths that pass through dust more readily and that dust itself re-emits after absorbing starlight. That combination let Webb pick out the individual dust clumps and their shadowed tails — features that were essentially invisible in Hubble's data, per NASA's release.
There's a color-perception wrinkle worth noting, flagged by PetaPixel: much of what made the nebula look "lion-like" in the first place was Hubble's choice of an orange color palette for that 2000 image, not necessarily the underlying physical geometry. Webb's infrared data, rendered in its own false-color scheme, doesn't reproduce that same warm, mane-like impression — it shows something more textured and structurally busy, dominated by clump-and-tail features rather than smooth radial fur.
An Object on a Countdown
NGC 2392 is not a static portrait — it's a snapshot of a process already partway through its own ending. NASA's release states that the nebula, having taken several thousand years to assemble into its current form, is expected to fully disperse in roughly 10,000 years, as the white dwarf's radiation continues to erode the dust and push the ionized gas further outward. In cosmic terms, the "mane" Webb just photographed is a temporary phenomenon on its way to dissolving into the interstellar medium.
Q&A: The Basics
What is a planetary nebula, and why the confusing name? Despite the name, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets — early astronomers, viewing them through primitive telescopes, thought their round, glowing shapes resembled the disks of planets, and the label stuck. NGC 2392 is a textbook example: the expelled outer layers of a dying star, lit up by the hot stellar remnant at the center.
What's actually driving the structure? The white dwarf's intense radiation. It ionizes the surrounding gas, causing it to glow, and simultaneously heats and erodes the surviving clumps of dust, carving the comet-tail shapes Webb resolved.
Why compare against a 26-year-old Hubble image instead of newer data? Hubble's 2000 observation remains the most recognizable public image of NGC 2392, and pairing it with Webb's infrared view makes the wavelength difference concrete — the same object, two instruments, two very different pictures of what's physically there.
Why It Matters
Planetary nebulae like NGC 2392 are previews of what will eventually happen to sun-like stars, including our own — a preview written in gas and dust rather than speculation. Webb's ability to resolve individual dust clumps and their interaction with a white dwarf's radiation gives astronomers a clearer physical model of how these structures form and unwind, refining estimates like the roughly 10,000-year dispersal timeline cited in NASA's release. More broadly, the side-by-side with Hubble is a useful public demonstration of why infrared astronomy matters: entire structural features of the universe — dust clumps, shielded gas, shadowed tails — are simply absent from visible-light images, not because they aren't there, but because visible light can't show them. As Webb continues re-imaging classic Hubble targets, expect more familiar cosmic objects to get quietly rewritten.
