On Thu, 01 Dec 2005 08:18:04 -0600, starburst wrote:


A GIANT HUBBLE MOSAIC OF THE CRAB NEBULA

The Crab Nebula is a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's
supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers recorded this
violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054, as did, almost certainly,
Native Americans. This composite image was assembled from 24 individual
exposures taken with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and
Planetary Camera 2 in October 1999, January 2000, and December 2000.
It is one of the largest images taken by Hubble and is the highest
resolution image ever made of the entire Crab Nebula.


Amazing picture. I noticed something kind of neat, too. If you look at
the right side of the spacetelescope site, under image 2, you'll see
that the widefield photo is taken by Akira Fujii. There's a photographer
who's really rubbing shoulders with the big boys!

Also the mosaic cames from an amateur!
http://www.skyfactory.org/hst/crab/crab.htm