#messier
The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier’s famous 18th century list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, debris from the death explosion of a massive star, witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. This sharp, ground-based telescopic view combines broadband color data with narrowband data that tracks the emissions from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms to explore the tangled filaments within the still expanding cloud. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is visible as a bright spot near the nebula’s center. Like a cosmic dynamo, this collapsed remnant of the stellar core powers the Crab’s emission across the electromagnetic spectrum. Spanning about 12 light-years, the Crab Nebula is a mere 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
Image Credit & Copyright: Michael Sherick
Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565, also known as the Needle Galaxy, is viewed edge-on from Earth. This sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy’s boxy, bulging central core, obscured by dust lanes. NGC 4565 itself lies about 40 million light-years from Earth and spans about 100,000 light-years. Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.
Image Credit & Copyright: Michael Sherick
Lagoon Nebula in the constellation Sagittarius (combined view of infrared and visible light)
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This is Messier 106!
This beautiful spiral galaxy is special because it has an extra set of arms, rather than the usual one pair. These arms may have been created from the violent gravitational interactions of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s center!
Taken by me (Michelle Park) using the Slooh Canary Two telescope on January 13th, 2021 at 23:53 UTC.
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