Light from a few foreground stars seen in the WFPC2 image provides only a hint of the many other stars embedded in this dense cloud. Here, stars and glowing interstellar dust, heated by and scattering the intense starlight, appear yellow-orange. Emission by excited hydrogen molecules appears blue. The image is oriented with north up and east to the left. The diagonal extent of the image is about 0.4 light-years.
Some details are as small as the size of our solar system.
The STIS long-slit spectrograph viewed the entire ring system, dissecting its light and producing a detailed image of the ring in each of its component colors. The ratio of the ring's brightness in different colors, emanating from the same elements, gives a measure of the concentration of the gasses. The light from different elements also identifies gasses at different temperatures. The ring formed 30,000 years before the star exploded and so is a fossil record of the final stages of the star's existence. The light from the supernova heated the gas in the ring so that it now glows at temperatures from 5,000 to 25,000 degrees Kelvin.