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Just in time for the Hubble Space Telescope’s 29th anniversary comes a new image of the Southern Crab Nebula (Hen 2-104) captured in recent weeks, offering a clear look at the nebula first captured by Hubble on August 24, 1999. Unlike the first image, which is pixelated and orange, the new image is colorful with a higher resolution.
The Southern Crab Nebula is located in Centaurus constellation’s southern hemisphere; though it is shaped like an hourglass, the nebula’s bright edges give a vaguely crab-like appearance, hence the name.
According to NASA, the nebula was first observed in the 1960s, though it was thought to be an ordinary star until the first image was captured by the ESO’s La Silla Observatory in 1989. It was Hubble’s initial 1999 image that revealed the nebula’s ‘complicated nested structures,’ the space agency explains.
The new higher resolution image is a composite created from multiple images captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. The images were captured in different colors that are associated with the oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and hydrogen gases present in the nebula. The Hubble Space Telescope website offers technical details on how the Southern Crab Nebula formed.
Other notable images captured by Hubble are available here.