The Crab Nebula – M1 – is the expanding remains of a supernova that was seen in 1054 throughput medieval Europe, The Middle East and China. The nebula is very distant at about 6500 light years and lies in the Perseus Arm of our galaxy, further out from The Galaxy’s core than The Sun. It is called The Crab because William Parsons from his Irish observatory who first viewed it in 1840 thought it resembled the outline of a crab and the name has stuck. The object was first observed in the 1731 and was linked to the Supernova of 1054 as recently as 1913. Earlier photographic plates from the 1950’s and those taken today show a definite expansion in the nebula in the intervening 70 years.
Image Technical Data
Imaged from my backyard in Nottingham, UK in the winter of 2017 with my TEC 140 refractor and Atik 460 cooled CCD camera and Baader LRGB filters. I used a NEQ6 mount guided with OAG.
All images data binned 1×1:
Lum > 10 x 900s ; Red > 15 x 300s ; Green 15 x 300s ; Blue > 19 x 300s
Image capture with APT and processing in PixInsight and Photoshop CC.
Comments are closed.