A dying star has never looked so lovely. A telescope atop Hawaii’s tallest peak, Mauna Kea, captured the star in its last gasps. The image was released Thursday. It’s actually a binary star system 1,500 light-years away, nicknamed the Crystal Ball Nebula because of the milky white, spherical cloud of gas around it. The cloud forms when a star sheds its outer layers near the end of its life. The exposed stellar core heats the cloud to tens of thousands of degrees, giving it an ethereal glow. Scientists believe one of the nebula’s two orbiting stars gave up the ghost.