 Three decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest exploding stars in more than 400 years. The Titanic supernova, called 1987A, blazed with the power of 100 million suns for several months following its discovery. Here we have an archival photographic plate of the star before it exploded next to one where it had. A dense ring of gas around the supernova is glowing in optical light and has a diameter of about one light-year. A flash of ultraviolet light from the explosion energized the gas in the ring, making it glow for decades. This time-lapse video sequence of Hubble images show the effects of the shockwave from the supernova blast smashing into the ring. The ring begins to brighten as the shockwave hits it. In the past few years, the ring's x-ray light has stopped getting brighter and the bottom-left part of the ring has started to fade. These changes provide evidence that the explosion's blast wave has moved into the region beyond the ring. This represents the end of an era for the supernova. We expect to learn more about the new region as the blast wave impacts its contents.