SpaceSphere

Crab Nebula

Supernova remnant

What is left of a star that exploded, seen and written down by Chinese astronomers who watched it light up the daytime sky.

Can you see it tonight?

Where are you?

To work out whether you can see this tonight, we need to know roughly where you are looking from. Your position stays in your browser: it is never sent to us, never stored and never shared.

Without it, everything else on this page still holds: what this object is, where it sits on the sky, and where every fact came from.

What it looks like

A photograph of the patch of sky containing Crab Nebula, taken by a telescope on the ground.

A photograph of this patch of sky, taken by a telescope on the ground. Crab Nebula sits in the middle, with the surrounding sky around it.

Brightness adjusted so faint detail shows. Every picture here is a rendering of the survey's measurements rather than a measurement itself, and this is the same setting for all of them.

Position
83.63321, 22.01447Source: NASA Extragalactic Database
Brightness
about 8.4Source: HyperLeda
Apparent size
about 8 x 4 arcminutesSource: OpenNGC
Constellation
Taurus

Catalogue designations

NGC1952, M1, IRAS 05315+2158, LBN 833

Source: OpenNGC