The supernova that created the Crab Nebula was witnessed with the naked eye and recorded by the Chinese in 1054. Europeans discovered the nebula in the 1700s, and it earned its distinctive name from a drawing made around 1844 by the Earl of Rosse.

This famous image is a composite of 26 individual pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 1999 and 2000. The blue represents oxygen atoms, the red ions of oxygen, the green sulfur, and the orange stray remnants of the star, mostly hydrogen.