In 1840, the highly British 3rd Earl of Rosse noted this object through his 0.9 meter—long telescope and sketched out what he saw. The drawing looked like a crab and so the Crab Nebula’s nome came to be. Eight years later, the 3rd Earl of Rosse had upgraded to a double—size telescope and was like, “oh wait no it doesn’t look like a crab” but no one cared, so that was that. The Crab Nebula is 6,500 light years away from us and is the fallout from a supernova that happened in 1054 AD. The effects of the supernova are still so powerful that the nebula keeps expanding at an incredible rate of about 1,500 km/s.
Keishinrei 