Crab Nebula, Messier 1
The Crab Nebula is an expanding remnant of a stars supernova explosion. Astronomers in Japan and China observed this explosion in the night sky about 1000 years ago and they described the event as the presence of a guest star. It lies in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way at a distance of 6400 light years away from earth.
When massive stars run out of energy at the end of their life stages they can explode. The visual appearance of a supernova is very brief lasting only for weeks or a few months and is a rare event. The last supernova event in the Milky Way occurred 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Charles Messier (1730-1817) was a French astronomer who published a catalogue consisting of 110 nebulae and star clusters. He was mainly interested in documenting comets and made this catalogue for stationary objects like nebulae to avoid wasting time by sorting them out from the comets he was looking for. The objects designated from M 1 to M 110 are still used today by astronomers.
Milky Way drawing for Wikipedia by Pablo Carlos Budassi.
This I think is a spectacular drawing of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, showing the different arms of this spiral galaxy. All nebulae and star clusters that I image are located here. Nebulae located in other galaxies are just too distant and small for me to visualize with my gear. In the drawing you can find our solar system marked as “Sun”. When I take a picture of the Milky Way I would like to include the center of our galaxy but this part is only visible during the summer night sky in the northern hemisphere where the nights are too bright. When I travel south on vacations I try to bring my “travel rig” equipment to take Milky Way shots that include its center.