Draco's own article rightly centres Thuban, the former pole star of the pyramid age. Coiled further along the dragon's long body is an object considerably harder to explain than a star that simply lost its job to precession.
The Cat's Eye Nebula, catalogued as NGC 6543, is a planetary nebula, the glowing shell of gas cast off by a dying, Sun-like star in its final stages, and Hubble Space Telescope images of it revealed a structure far more intricate than the smooth, simple shells seen around most other planetary nebulae: concentric rings, jets, knots and bubble-like features layered over one another in a pattern astronomers have not fully accounted for with a single explanation. Leading theories involve a companion star, or a central star that ejected material unevenly over repeated episodes rather than in one smooth outflow, but no single model has settled the question of how the nebula came to look the way it does.
That a small, historically minor object buried partway along Draco's coils turned out, once imaged in enough detail, to be one of the most structurally puzzling planetary nebulae known is itself a small irony: the dragon's own myth, guarding the golden apples until Heracles came for them, has a tidier ending than the star it is still guarding.