The toothpaste nebula

In this photograph, the small, spectrally dispersed planetary nebula IC 418 in Lepus has appeared to jump, creating a stripe of a familiar looking toothpaste.

Tiny planetary nebula

This picture is of a tiny planetary nebula in the constellation of Lepus, called IC418. From the Hubble picture, it was christened the Spirograph nebula. This picture might not be particularly good but when I looked at it with a high magnification, it looked like a star surrounded by tiny pink rose petals. For some reason the central star is trailed, but the exposure was only 1 second taken remotely at the ISO800 setting on the camera. Unless there was camera shake, I have to presume the central portion of the nebula is elongated. I had to double the width and height of each pixel for this image. There appears to be a bit of structure in the pink disk.