Taurus the Bull rises early winter evenings with its long horns trailing to the northeast. Just slightly over 1 degree northwest of Zeta Tauri -- the star marking the tip of the southeastern horn -- lies the Bull's most intriguing deep-sky object, the Crab Nebula. Number 1 in Charles Messier's list of nonstellar objects, the Crab Nebula is gaseous remains of a supernova recorded by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in 1054.[inset]

This object is one of the few supernova remnants that can just be detected by binoculars, but only if your sky is dark enough. With angular measurements of only 6x4 arcminutes, it appears as small wooly star in a pair of 7x50s. A 4- to 8-inch (101- to 203-millimeter) telescope at medium magnification shows a wispy oval without much texture, and increased magnification does little to improve detail. Larger instruments, however, reveal serrated edges and filaments along the outer edges of the nebula. Long-exposure photographs and digital images reveal a beautiful, tortured object crisscrossed by tendrils of hot gas that have been swept up into shockwaves from the supernova blast.