Messier 1, known as M1 or The Crab Nebula is a remnant of a supernova explosion in the constellation of Taurus. It is the 1st entry in the list that comet hunter Charles Messier compiled of objects that are not comets. The nebula is the visible debris left over from a star that exploded and was seen in the year 1054. There is a pulsar (spinning neutron star) in the center that is the leftover of the star that exploded. It's visible as the lower right star of the two very close stars seen here in the center of the nebula. M1 is about 6500 light-years from us. I took this photograph with my home-made telescope from my backyard that has significant light pollution (Bortle 8-9).
Photographer: Rick Scott
Date / time: January 8, 2019 at 8:43 - 10:46 PM MST
Telescope: home-made 10" f/4.6 Lurie-Houghton
Mount: Losmandy HGM Titan with Gemini 2
Guiding: Lumicon Easy Guider, ZWO ASI120MM Mini, PHD2
Camera: Canon EOS 60Da digital camera
Filter: Optolong L-Pro
Exposures: 21 x 300 sec (1.75 hours), f/4.6, ISO 400 in raw mode
no flats, no bias, no dark frames
JaZ 2 Observatory
Software: DeepSkyStacker (DSS) for alignment, stacking, and RAW conversion; Adobe Photoshop CS6 for image processing
Updated: May 5, 2019