Picture of the Crab pulsar taken at the Leuschner Observatory by Dick Treffers, taken through a 30-inch reflector with a CCD camera equipped with a rotating wheel. The wheel spun with same frequency as the pulsar flashes: 29.9 Hertz. Each sub-image shows the pulsar at a particular phase, and took one minute of integration time. The phases proceed 45 deg from image to image in the sequence.

Adopted from Michael Richmond's service

NOAO image of the Crab pulsar

Here, a time sequence for the pulsar in the Crab nebula is shown, and its location in the Crab nebula (as shown in a KPNO 4-meter Mayall image). The images of this sequence were also obtained with the 4-meter Mayall telescope on Kitt Peak, during the night of 20 October 1989 using a standard B-band optical filter and the Kitt Peak Photon Counting Array (KPCA). Phased accumulation over almost 2 hours was necessary to create this image; the observed period that day was 33.36702 milliseconds.

Each of the 33 images represents a time slice of about 1 millisecond in the pulsar period. The brighter, primary pulse is visible in the first column: the weaker, broader inter-pulse can be seen in the second column.
Credit: N.A.Sharp/AURA/NOAO/NSF

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Last Modification: June 18, 1999