Type of Object:  The Crab Nebula is the result of a supernova explosion. The supernova occurred in the year 1054 AD and was observed by astronomers aorund the world.  The exploding star remained brighter than Venus for 23 days - easily seen during the day! The nebula emits electromagnetic radiation from x-rays to radio. The driving energy source is a pulsar - the neutron star after the explosion. The neutron star rotates about 30 times per second, is a few kilometers in diameter, and has the mass equivalent to the mass of the Sun.

Distance: 6300 light years (= 6 x 10¹⁶ km = 3.7 x 10¹⁶ miles)
Size: About 10 light years across (= 9.5 x 10¹³ km = 5.9 x 10¹³ miles)
Coordinates (Epoch J2000):
         Right Ascension:  05 34 31.97
         Declination:          +22 00 52.1

Other Names: M1, Taurus A

Radio Brightness at 1420 MHz (21 cm): 930 Jy

Some Links
http://www.seds.org/messier/m/m001.html
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/0052/
http://sirtf.caltech.edu/Education/Messier/m1.html

Images shown below, at different wavelengths, cover a
0.5 degree x 0.5 degree area of the sky centered on the nebula.  The images are taken from the SKYVIEW Virtual Observatory maintained under NASA ADP Grant NAS5-32068 with P.I. Thomas A. McGlynn under the auspices of the High Energy Astrophysics Science  Archive Research Center (HEASARC) at the GSFC Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics. SKYVIEW contains catalogs and surveys from x-ray to radio observations. The site is located at http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/