Structurally, the object has had high-resolution images by the Hubble Space Telescope revealing knots, jets, bubbles and complex arcs, being illuminated by the central hot planetary nebula nucleus (PNN).

At the centre of the Cat's Eye Nebula is a dying Wolf Rayet star, the sort of which can be seen in the Webb Telescope's image of WR 124.

Hubble Space Telescope images show a sort of dart board pattern of concentric rings emanating outwards from the centre.

[4] Deep images reveal an extended halo about 300 arcsec or 5 arcminutes across,[5] that was once ejected by the central progenitor star during its red giant phase.

[14] Observations of NGC 6543 at far-infrared wavelengths (about 60 μm) reveal the presence of stellar dust at low temperatures.

[16] The Hubble Space Telescope image produced here is in false colour, designed to highlight regions of high and low ionisation.

[17] In 2001, observations at X-ray wavelengths by the Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed the presence of extremely hot gas within NGC 6543 with the temperature of 1.7×106 K.[18] It is thought that the very hot gas results from the violent interaction of a fast stellar wind with material previously ejected.

A star with the photospheric temperature of about 100,000 K would not be expected to emit strongly in hard X-rays, and so their presence is something of a mystery.

[19] The hard X-ray data remain intriguing more than ten years later: the Cat's Eye was included in a 2012 Chandra survey of 21 central stars of planetary nebulae (CSPNe) in the solar neighborhood, which found: "All but one of the X-ray point sources detected at CSPNe display X-ray spectra that are harder than expected from hot (~100,000 K) central star photospheres, possibly indicating a high frequency of binary companions to CSPNe.

Assuming a line of sight expansion velocity of 16.4 km·s−1, this implies that NGC 6543's distance is 1001±269 parsecs (3×1019 k or 3300 light-years) away from Earth.

[22] Like most astronomical objects, NGC 6543 consists mostly of hydrogen and helium, with heavier elements present in small quantities.

[13] These are fairly typical abundances for planetary nebulae, with the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen abundances all larger than the values found for the sun, due to the effects of nucleosynthesis enriching the star's atmosphere in heavy elements before it is ejected as a planetary nebula.

[24] Deep spectroscopic analysis of NGC 6543 may indicate that the nebula contains a small amount of material which is highly enriched in heavy elements; this is discussed below.

[14] The central bright part of the nebula consists of the inner elongated bubble (inner ellipse) filled with hot gas.

[1] The existence of an accretion disk caused by mass transfer between the two components of the system may give rise to astronomical jets, which would interact with previously ejected material.

These rings are very evenly spaced, suggesting that the mechanism responsible for their formation ejected them at very regular intervals and at very similar speeds.