Painting the Wings of the Butterfly Nebula

As I've mentioned a bazillion times before, I'm fascinated by planetary nebulae. These are winds of gas blown off by dying stars, illuminated and set to glow by the hot stars in their centers, and generally sculpted into fantastic shapes that can be anything from thin soap bubbles to highly elongated cylindrical barrels. One of the most spectacular is M2-9, a double-lobed beastie very roughly 2,000 light-years away. The image above was recently released, using older images from Hubble combined w...