A lot of detailed filaments show up in this photo of the Crab nebula M1. This exposure was taken through a narrow band H-alpha filter to make the filamentary structure stand out somewhat. From Greg Bothun's collection at the University of Oregon.

M1 image from an anonymous source

This image was obtained by Sven Kohle and Till Credner of Bonn, Germany on October 26, 1995 at 23:05 UT with the 1.23-meter telescope of the Calar Alto observatory, with a 2048x2048 CCD camera. It was composed from 3 exposures taken with different filters: B and V, 10 minutes each, H-alpha: 20 minutes. The image is copyrighted by the observers.

Narrow band filter image of M1 (in the lines of H alpha, SII and OIII), taken by Scott J. Wolk and Nancy R. Adams on Kitt Peak in January 1997.

NOAO image of M1

This picture of the Crab Nebula was taken using Ektachrome film at the prime focus of the Kitt Peak 4-meter Mayall telescope on October 1, 1973. Although this is a simple color-film image of rather short exposure time, the Crab Pulsar is clearly visible; it is the slightly lower and more right (South-West; in this pic, North is up and East is left) of the two central stars of this nebula - the second of these stars is a foreground object projected over the nebula.
Credit: Bill Schoening/AURA/NOAO/NSF
Higher-resolution version available e.g. via NOAO's Emission Nebula Gallery

This color composite was composed from two images taken on the night of October 27th 1995 with the NOAO/STIS/Tektronix 2048x2048 CCD detector on the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope. This image is rather sharp: 0.2 arc seconds per pixel, while "seeing" limits the image definition to about 0.6 arc seconds - still a factor 2 better than in typical Earth-based images. Some very fine details, as the shell-like features near the center of the nebula, and subtle filamentary structures, are well resolved in this image. The first image shows the original composite, while in the second image, unsharp masking was applied to bring out the filamentary detail even more clearly.
Credit: Jay Gallagher (U. Wisconsin), N.A. Sharp (NOAO)/WIYN/NOAO/NSF
Higher-resolution versions of both images are available e.g. thru the WIYN Emission Nebula Gallery

The Crab Nebula, remnant of the 1054 supernova in Taurus, is shown in a three-color reconstruction from BVR CCD images taken in 1993 with the 1.1m Hall telescope at Lowell Observatory. The red image is dominated by H-alpha and [N II] emission, while the B and V filters include substantial mixtures of continuum and line emission. The pulsar is visible as the southwestern (lower right) of the two stars just southeast of the brightest nebulosity.

From Bill Keel's image collection at the University of Alabama.
Credit: Bill Keel.

Further images of M1:

• Palomar image of M1 by Paul Scowen
• Palomar images of M1 by Jay M. Pasachoff and David Malin
• Hubble Space Telescope images of M1
• M1 in visible and x-ray light (Astro-1 mission)
• Amateur images of M1; more amateur images

Last Modification: May 23, 1998