The Crab Nebula

One of the most beautiful pictures I have seen taken from the Hubble space telescope by NASA and is one of the largest objects it has ever taken a picture of. In fact it took 24 wide angle pictures just to make this one photo.

This Nebula is 6,500 light-years away and 6 light-years wide. It is almost as wide as its distance to us which makes this a very observable nebula. Great for our scientific investigations!

This Nebula is the result of a Stars death In a super Nova explosion that happened around 1000 years ago and was witness by civilizations of the time. Even Native Americans have shown us that they were witness to this marvelous event.

The colors indicate what was expelled in the explosion.The orange is the shattered remains of the original star and is made mostly of Hydrogen. The blue light are electrons streaming through space at near the speed of light and is made of oxygen, green is singly-ionized sulfur, and red indicates doubly-ionized oxygen.