Crab Nebula
From Slackerpedia Galactica
The Crab Nebula is so named because its....well crabby. It kept bothering Messier so much he finally agreed to call it M1 just to shut it up. Various theories have been put forth to explain this crabbiness but most of them point to lingering pain from when it went supernova back in 1054. The Chinese and Arab astronomers were pretty amazed seeing this bright thing in the sky, bright enough to be seen in the daytime. Being early generation Slackers they never got around to building radio telescopes to find out the Crab Nebula was a pulsar. Some thought the pulsar must have been a "galactic lighthouse" placed by an advanced civilazation. Uhh, they were wrong. The Crab is a really nice faint fuzzy and is very photogenic, just don't use a flash, that really makes it crabby (and ruins your photo, Duh!). The Hubble has taken a few nice photos so depending on your bandwidth choose your favorite. [1]
Technical stuff
The nebula is about 6300 lightyears away, the pulsar rotates about 30 times every second (and is slowly slowing down), it covers about 11 lightyears in diameter.
