This deep sky object is called the Crab Nebula. It is a supernova remnant that was the first Messier Object – M1. It is located in the Constellation Taurus and is a Milky Way Galaxy resident that is about 6500 light years away. Messier was tired of finding objects like this when he was searching for Comets, so he devised a list of deplorables like this in order to avoid them in the future. I managed to tease out some interesting detail in M1 by using three extremely narrow… band filters (Oxygen, Hydrogen and Nitrogen) and assigning them to colors that would enhance the detail in the image. One advantage of narrow band filters is that they filter out moon glow which was almost at it’s peak during these imaging sessions. The 25 stacked exposures totaled about 12.5 hours through a six inch refractor at f8 with a 1200mm focal length. More details are available at my Astrobin site. http://astrob.in/287183/0/
Astro La Vista Observatory 