In this symbiotic system, a red giant throws off material in a powerful stellar wind, and a white dwarf companion catches some of it. As a result, an accretion disk of material forms around the white dwarf and spirals onto its hot surface.
Gas continues to build up on the surface until it sparks an eruption, blowing material into space.
The eruptions have formed the shape of this nebula into an hourglass nestled within an hourglass. If you have a good 6 or 8 inch telescope that has a drive suitable to make photos of the planets, please read on. You can, with a photoelectric photometer mounted on your telescope, obtain scientifically useful astronomical data. If you have a bright polluted sky, it will be less of a bother with PEP than it is with photography. What you would be doing is called photoelectric photometry of variable stars.