The European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile has captured a beautiful high resolution picture of the nebula “Eye of God”. The new image shows a rich background of distant galaxies.

The Helix Nebula, NGC 7293 or the “Eye of God” lies about 700 light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius. So far astronomers were able to see only a dim view of this Nebula.

Using a telescope with a Wide Field Imager, they were able to capture a high resolution image of this Helix Nebula. The observatory is located at La Silla in Chile.

ESO describes this Helix Nebula as the following:

These exotic objects have nothing to do with planets, but are the final blooming of Sun-like stars before their retirement as white dwarfs. Shells of gas are blown off from a star’s surface, often in intricate and beautiful patterns, and shine under the harsh ultraviolet radiation from the faint, but very hot, central star. The main ring of the Helix Nebula is about two light-years across or half the distance between the Sun and its closest stellar neighbor.

The researchers think the Helix contains two separate discs with outer rings and filaments. The inner disc is expanding at about 100,000 km/h and is believed to have taken 12,000 years for it to form this current shape.

The main thing the researchers found in this new image was that they were able to locate many remote galaxies through the near-transparent central part of the eye.

Our Sun will also look something similar when it reaches its end in about five billion years.