           APOD: 2018 January 4 - M1: The Incredible Expanding Crab

                         Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! [1] Each day a different image or photograph of our
 fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a
                           professional astronomer.

                                2018 January 4
                                      [2]
                      M1: The Incredible Expanding Crab
              Image Credit & Copyright [3] : Detlef Hartmann [4]

Explanation: The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first on Charles
Messier's [5]  famous list [5]  of things which are not comets [6] . In fact,
the Crab is [7] now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of
debris from the explosion of a massive star. The violent birth of the Crab was
witnessed by astronomers [8]  in the year 1054. Roughly 10 light-years across
today, the nebula is still expanding at a rate of over 1,000 kilometers per
second. Over the past decade, its expansion has been documented in this
stunning time-lapse movie [9] . In each year from 2008 to 2017, an image was
produced with the same telescope and camera from a remote observatory in
Austria. Combined in the time-lapse movie, the 10 images represent 32 hours of
total integration time. The sharp, processed frames even reveal the dynamic
energetic emission [10]  within the incredible expanding Crab. The Crab Nebula
lies about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus [11] .

                   Tomorrow's picture: pixels in space [12]

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Site notes:
  [1] archivepix.html
  [2] https://www.astrobin.com/full/327338/0/
  [3] lib/about_apod.html#srapply
  [4] https://www.astrobin.com/users/DetlefHartmann/
  [5] http://messier.seds.org/xtra/history/m-cat71.html
  [6] ap110901.html
  [7] ap010602.html
  [8] http://messier.seds.org/more/m001_sn.html
  [9] https://www.astrobin.com/327338/0/
  [10] http://hubblesite.org/video/899/news/104-annotated
  [11] ap121224.html
  [12] ap180105.html
  [13] ap180103.html
  [14] archivepix.html
  [15] lib/apsubmit2015.html
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  [24] http://www.phy.mtu.edu/faculty/Nemiroff.html
  [25] http://www.phy.mtu.edu/
  [26] http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/jbonnell/www/bonnell.html
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