Image #240228

The smudge at the center of the image is the debris cloud, now called the Crab Nebula [M1, NGC 1952], of a star that exploded in the year 1054 A.D. in the constellation of Taurus the Bull. At the center of the cloud is the star’s city-sized core that is now a rapidly spinning pulsar sweeping Earth with its radio waves 30 times a second.

This is a relatively wide-angle view of the nebula and its environs requiring a much darker site than my backyard affords along with more magnification and longer exposure times to bring out more details in the nebula.