The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets.
In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, expanding debris from the death explosion of a massive star.
This intriguing false-color image combines data from space-based observatories, Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer, to explore the debris cloud in x-rays (blue-purple), optical (green), and infrared (red) light.
One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is the bright spot near picture center.
Like a cosmic dynamo, this collapsed remnant of the stellar core powers the Crab's emission across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Spanning about 12 light-years, the Crab Nebula is 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
