NICMOS Peers Into Heart of Dying Star

The Egg Nebula, also known as CRL 2688, is shown on the left as it appears in visible light with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2(WFPC2) and on the right as it appears in infrared light with Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Since infrared light is invisible to humans, the NICMOS image has been assigned colours to distinguish different wavelengths: blue corresponds to starlight reflected by dust particles, and red corresponds to heat radiation emitted by hot molecular hydrogen.