The Lousy Nebula?

There's a long-standing controversy over the origin of the name
"Crab Nebula" for M1. Traditionally, people have said that it was
named after the sketch that Lord Rosse did with his 36-inch scope,
available online at www.seds.org/messier/more/m001_rosse.html

Others have pointed out that this sketch looks nothing like a
crab, and claimed instead that it was named after Rosse's later
sketch with his 72-inch scope, which looks like a lobster claw.

Now when I first saw the 36-inch sketch, I did indeed think of a
crab -- not the kind that lives in the water, but the kind that
lives on people's bodies. I'm intimately familiar with head lice
after repeated epidemics at my daughter's school.

Just to make sure, I looked up the term in the Oxford English
Dictionary, and found out that "crab louse" has been in use
at least since the 16th century. And it has been abbreviated
as "crab" at least since Cuvier's "Anatomy" was translated
into English in 1840.

- Tony Flanders

How about the Scabies Nebula?!

=
http://www.stanford.edu/class/humbio...s/Scabies%20H=
ome.htm

-Florian