 Here we are zooming into the ring nebula, one of the earliest and most famous of all planetary nebula. As you can see, it closely resembles the helix nebula we covered earlier. We are looking almost directly down one of the poles of the structure, with a brightly colored barrel of material stretching away from us. From Earth's perspective, the ring nebula looks like a simple elliptical shape with a fuzzy boundary. But the new Hubble observations show clearly that the nebula is actually shaped more like a distorted donut. The main structure of the nebula is a broad ring of nitrogen. That's the red ring you see. The hotter gas is oxygen, seen in green here, and it fills the interior. What's even hotter still is helium. Being here as blue oblong lobes, stretching out perpendicular to the nebula's main structure and looking like a rugby ball, our first planetary nebula we're facing the Earth so that we could see down the tube. From this one, the retina nebula, we are viewing the donut from the side.