Some ten thousand years ago, a dying star began releasing its outer layers into the void, and what emerged from that slow unraveling is a cloud of gas and dust shaped, by cosmic coincidence, like the face of a lion. NASA's James Webb Telescope has now rendered this object — known formally as NGC 2392 and first glimpsed by William Herschel in 1787 — in infrared light so precise that the colors themselves become a map of elemental forces still at work. We are, in witnessing these images, watching a chapter of stellar life that will close within roughly the same span of time it has already been o