The butterfly's wings point in the direction of jets with their axis titled by 50° to the line of sight.

The waist of the "butterfly" is surrounded by a torus of expanding hot gas forming the inner bright ellipse.

[2] Like any other planetary nebula, Fleming 1 was formed when an old asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star lost its outer hydrogen-rich envelope, leaving behind a hot core (young white dwarf)—the central star of the nebula.

[2] Observations performed by European Southern Observatory showed that the central star is in fact a double degenerate (made of two white dwarfs) binary with a period of 1.1953 ± 0.0002 days.

Its temperature is about 120,000 K providing the bulk of high energy photons needed to ionize the nebula.