There are even nights when I will just look at a constellation and think about all the magnificent things which lay in its direction. Who needs TV? The greatest show in the cosmos is right outside…

Great photo Don!

According to Minkowski's observations, NGC 6302 "exhibits a wide range of excitation and ionization conditions, and is expanding in a manner suggestiong an explosive origin." This was done at optical wavelengths. Even with photoelectric observations, it's still not clear what's driving the expansion "with mass motions that must yet be explained."

As for Aodhhan's question:

According to the work of Matsuura, Aijlstra, Molster and Waters: "The butterfly-shaped planetary nebula, NGC 6302, shows a unique, dense equatorial dark lane, which is presumably a dusty disc, obscuring an unobserved, very hot central star. We trace the structure of this disc using Hubble Space Telescope Hα and [Nii] images, Very Large Telescope L-and M-band images at 0.4-arcsec resolution, including Brα and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) images, and a James Clerk Maxwell Telescope 450-μm image. Extinction maps are derived from these images. Within the disc, the extinction is AHα= 5–7 mag and ABrα= 1–2 mag . The 450-μm map shows a north–south elongated central core, tracing the massive dust disc, and extended emission from dust in the bipolar flows. A fit to the spectral energy distribution yields the disc dust mass of 0.03 M⊙ . The innermost region shows an ionized shell. The orientation of the polar axis shows a marked change between shell, disc and inner and outer outflow. The structures are well described by the warped-disc model of Icke (2003). PAH images are presented: PAH emission is found in the shell but avoids the disc. An infrared source is found close to the expected location of the central star."

I know that's doesn't precisely answer your question – but the truth is, science doesn't precisely know what's going on either! The most recent is from Kemper, Molster, Jager and Waters:

"We have analysed the full ISO spectrum of the planetary nebula NGC 6302 in order to derive the mineralogical composition of the dust in the nebula. We use an optically thin dust model in combination with laboratory measurements of cosmic dust analogues. We find two main temperature components at about 100 and 50 K respectively, with distinctly different dust compositions. The warm component contains an important contribution from dust without strong infrared resonances. In particular the presence of small warm amorphous silicate grains can be excluded. The detection of weak PAH bands also points to a peculiar chemical composition of the dust in this oxygen-rich nebula. The cool dust component contains the bulk of the mass and shows strong emission from crystalline silicates, which contain about 10 percent of the mass. In addition, we identify the 92 μm band with the mineral calcite, and argue that the 60 μm band contains a contribution from the carbonate dolomite. We present the mass absorption coefficients of six different carbonate minerals. The geometry of the dust shell around NGC 6302 is studied with mid-infrared images obtained with TIMMI2. We argue that the cool dust component is present in a circumstellar dust torus, while the diffuse emission from the warm component originates from the lobes."

But your suggestion sure sounds logical…

How do they know that this is the results of an explosion? Can you tell by the spectral lines (indicating what elements are possessed) that it was an explosion or is it something else?