The Crab Nebula (M1 or NGC 1952) is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus. The nebula is the remnant of a bright supernova recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054 A.D. that was visible during the daytime. The nebula lies in the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, at a distance of about 6,500 light years from Earth. It has a diameter of 11 light years, corresponding to an apparent diameter of about 7 arcminutes as seen from Earth, and is expanding at a rate of about 1,500 kilometers per second (930 mi/s), or 0.5% of the speed of light. At an apparent magnitude of 8.4, it is not visible to the naked eye but can be detected with a good telescope under reasonably dark skies.

This image was cropped from a test image taken using my new QHY247C camera that I'm beta testing. This is the average of nine ten-minute frames, stacked in DSS and processed in Photoshop. The camera was attached to my Celestron Deluxe CPC Edge HD.

This has always been a challenging target and previous attempts to obtain something I was happy with always failed. While this consists of fewer frames than I might like, the result was good enough that it's worth posting a fully processed image, especially given I might not get much more time on this target this year.

Image Center:	View full size annotated image.
Right Ascension:	5h 34m 32.056s (83° 38m 0.836s)
Declination:	+22° 0m 56.343s
Orientation:	Up is 3.1 degrees West of North.
Image Size:	18.282' x 13.262'	Pixel Scale:	0.288"

Principal objects in field: Crab nebula, M 1, NGC 1952

All identified catalog objects: HD 245010, NGC 1952, Tycho-2 1309-1361-1, Tycho-2 1309-1434-1, Tycho-2 1309-1471-1, Tycho-2 1309-1519-1, Tycho-2 1309-1640-1, Tycho-2 1309-1665-1