--- title: "NASA’s Webb shows the Lion Nebula’s dusty mane in infrared; the dying star’s shell will vanish in 10,000 years" url: https://badiyaa.com/lion-nebula-ngc-2392-webb-infrared/ published: 2026-11-12T21:45:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-12T21:45:00+00:00 section: Science publisher: Badiyaa --- # NASA’s Webb shows the Lion Nebula’s dusty mane in infrared; the dying star’s shell will vanish in 10,000 years NASA's Webb telescope imaged the Lion Nebula, NGC 2392, in infrared, showing a white dwarf's gas bubble inside a dusty mane due to vanish in 10,000 years. A dying star about 6,500 light-years away has been caught wearing a lion’s face, and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows the whole mane will be gone in roughly 10,000 years. Webb’s new composite of NGC 2392, nicknamed the Lion Nebula, combines near- and mid-infrared light to show a glowing gas “face” ringed by a dusty mane full of comet-like tufts. Ten thousand years sounds long, but for a star it is a blink. Our own star has been shining for about 4.6 billion years, so a nebula that lasts 10,000 years is visible for a tiny slice of a star’s life, which is part of why sharp portraits of one are valued. ## How Webb built the image from 5 filters Webb pointed two instruments at the nebula in the constellation Gemini. NIRCam, its Near Infrared Camera, and MIRI, its Mid Infrared Instrument, each see light far redder than human eyes can. According to the European Space Agency’s image record, the composite uses five filters spanning 1.15 to 10 micrometers, including one tuned to molecular hydrogen and one tuned to silicate dust. Each filter is assigned a visible color, and the layers are stacked. That is why the picture looks pink, purple and blue: the colors are a translation, not what you would see through an eyepiece. The field of view is only 1.77 arcminutes across, less than a tenth of the width of the full Moon. NASA released the composite and a MIRI-only version on 10 August 2026, with image processing by Alyssa Pagan of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. The Hubble Space Telescope had photographed the same object in visible light in 2000. ## What the lion is actually made of NGC 2392 is a planetary nebula, a misleading name for the shells of gas and dust that a lower-mass star throws off near the end of its life. It has nothing to do with planets. When such a star runs out of fuel in its core, it becomes unstable, pulses and sheds its outer layers, leaving a small, extremely hot core called a white dwarf. In the [NASA Webb mission team’s description](https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/lion-nebula-roars-to-life-with-nasas-webb/), that white dwarf sits in the middle like the lion’s button nose. Its radiation is “cooking” the surroundings and blowing a bubble of ionized gas, which forms the face. As the bubble grows, it destroys the dust in its path. Not all of it. The mane is the inner edge of a shell of dust lit from the center. The tufts that look like cometary tails are tight clumps of dust that have so far survived the radiation and shield the material sitting behind them. In the infrared view, extra clumps of molecular hydrogen glow yellow. Stars at this stage make much of the dust astronomers can observe in the universe, so watching which dust survives and which is destroyed is a direct look at how the raw material for future planets is recycled. ## What one image cannot settle A picture is a single moment. Webb’s view freezes structures that have taken several thousand years to form, and NASA notes that astronomers still do not fully understand why the swept-up gas forms such complex rings and shells, a pattern seen in many planetary nebulae. The 10,000-year lifetime is an estimate, not a measurement. A quick guide to the object, drawn from the [NGC 2392 catalog entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2392): - **Distance:** about 6,500 light-years, in Gemini. - **Discovered:** by William Herschel on 17 January 1787, in Slough, England. - **Other labels:** Caldwell 39 and the Clown Face Nebula; since 2020 several astronomy databases have urged using the NGC number instead of an older nickname now considered offensive. - **Brightness:** magnitude 9.1, within reach of a small backyard telescope. For more space imaging, Badiyaa has covered a [white dwarf that may be the first green star](https://badiyaa.com/first-green-star-white-dwarf-wd-j1330-6435/) and a [Hubble census of 37 dwarf galaxies missing their oxygen](https://badiyaa.com/hubble-dwarf-galaxies-missing-oxygen-glow-census/). NGC 2392 rides high in winter evening skies for Northern Hemisphere observers, just east of the star Delta Geminorum, so the next few months are the best time to find the real lion with your own telescope. ## Further reading - [NASA: Lion Nebula Roars to Life With NASA's Webb](https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/lion-nebula-roars-to-life-with-nasas-webb/) *Image: Thedarksideobservatory, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*