When people in the year 1054 witnessed the sudden appearance of a “daytime star”, they didn’t know what to make of it

BOOOOOM

When people in the year 1054 witnessed the sudden appearance of a “daytime star”, they didn’t know what to make of it. It faded over several months, but was recorded in literature by a handful of ancient astronomers and their notes have reached us today.

This is the aftermath, known as Messier 1 as the first entry in Charles Messier’s catalogue of crap in the sky that wasn’t comets. Also known as the Crab Nebula since a guy in 1832 looked at it through a telescope and felt it looked like a crab from what he could make out in a hand sketch.

Now we know it is the expanding shell of the supernova witnessed in 1054, still rapidly expanding and 11 lightyears across. It is one of the most epically colorful objects I have seen in our sky. This is a true color image, color calibrated to be shown in natural colors with the saturation turned up so that we can see them.

How incredibly terrible, violent, and beautiful all at once! This is how the raw material for new planets and life gets formed, and it is amazing to witness it!

I hope you like it and have a fantastic day!