Messier
1 - Crab Nebula.
Perhaps the best known entry in
Charles Messier's
catalog is the first one, the
remnants of a star that explodes in 1054. The appearance of
the "guest star"
was noted by Native American astronomers, as well as observers from
China, Japan and the Middle East. Although it was discovered by
John Bevis in
1731, it didn't get the name "Crab Nebula" until over a hundred
years later. That designation comes from sketches made by
William Parsons using a large reflecting telescope.
M1 is about 6500 light-years from earth, and is expanding at a rate of
1500 kilometers/second. This rapid expansion is fueled by a
neutron star at
its center, and changes in its size and structure are observable over
extended intervals. For more information on the Crab Nebula, see
the
NASA website.This image was made with my ASA 10N astrograph and STL11000M CCD. Hydrogen alpha data was combined with red, green, and blue (RGB) filtered images to produce the final image. Processing was done in MaximDL and Photoshop.
Ha data
For additional images from 2004 to the present, see my webpage.
.
This page illustrates what can be photographed using amateur telescopes and a CCD camera. I currently use an SBIG STL11000M camera and have previously used SBIG and Starlight Xpress cameras, as well as a Cookbook 245 camera that I built myself. Many of the images o this web site were taken from my backyard near a busy street with several street lights. Not only is the CCD camera a great imaging tool, but it allows "real time" observation of objects not normally visible in areas with moderate-severe light pollution.
