If memory serves, M1 was the second target I ever imaged. That was about 15 years ago, when my camera was a first-generation Meade DSI-C. During all the intervening years, I've never returned to the Crab, mostly because its small size provided a poor fit for the widefield setups that have replaced the gear that I used to take that first image of M1. My current gear still favors larger targets, but after 15 years, I thought it was high time to revisit this classic target.

As I embarked on processing my data, I was interested to see how my stock Nikon D5300 would render the colors of the Crab. I am used to seeing narrowband images of M1, in which reds and blues dominate. As you can see, in my image, the H-alpha-dominant portions of the nebula turned out to have a pink-ish hue. Most of the periphery of the nebula has a blue-ish tinge, while the central portion of the nebula, nearest the remnant neutron star, has a cream color. Earlier in my imaging career, I used to think of nebula images produced by stock DSLRs as second best, inferior to narrowband images. I've now grown to think of them as simply a different rendering of these targets, certainly different from narrowband images, but with a validity and aesthetic all their own.

We have more detailed information about the Crab Nebula than we do most other supernova remnants, simply because the event that produced it occurred during a period when dedicated stargazers were committing their observations to writing. And last year, we found out even more about M1. On June 28, 2021, a paper published in Nature Astronomy announced that supernova SN 2018zd, which occurred in March, 2018 and was subsequently observed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope, fit all the criteria of a long-theorized but formerly never observed type of supernova, called an electron-capture supernova. The observations of SN 2018zd also provided firm evidence that the event that gave birth to the Crab Nebula was also a supernova of this type.