It all started here. The crab nebula is the first cataloged deep-space object. Charles Messier was searching for the comet (1758) but discovered his first deep-space object. The Crab nebula, also called Messier 1, is a supernova remnant like a Veil nebula, but it’s much further from the Solar system – 6500 light years.

My first picture was made with a pinched mirror, therefore I waited two years and captured it properly. Since I live in a light-polluted area, I chose narrow band filters to get better contrast and composed this picture out of hydrogen alpha (red channel) and OIII (green and blue channel) narrow band pictures.

And here is the picture in “false” colors – Hubble palette (SII – red, Ha – green and OIII – blue).

Telescope:Newton 254/1000 mm
Aperture:254 mm
Focal length:1000 mm
Mount:Gemini GF53f
Autoguiding:Orion Mini, TS 50/160 mm
Camera:Moravian instruments G2 8300M @-30C
Corrector:GPU
Filters:Baader Ha, OIII
Exposure:16xHa, 10xOIII, 10xSII 300 s bin 1×1
Date:2017-01-07