In the year 1054 Chinese astronomers noted a very bright star that could be seen in the bright daylight. John Bevis published a new star catalog (epoch 1746) and maps which showed not only stars, but nebula including the nebula photographed below. Charles Messier noted the same nebula as no. 1 in his list of nebulae. However, he is not the discoverer of the nebula, because different astronomers confirmed the discovery of the nebula earlier. Today, Messier 1 (or NGC 1952) is believed the supernova remnant blown by the star explosion.

This image has been created from the original noisy raw data using an automated noise reduction based on a statistical evaluation of the pixel intensities. Color calibration was performed by using a star of spectral type G8. Additionally a fit of the black level was applied to remove strong sky background illumination from human light sources off the image.

The short exposure time led to a noisy input image. This shall be demonstrated by a crop of the nebula. The noise is not caused by insufficient camera properties, but limited by the small number of photo counts per pixel and thus the natural noise of the light detection process.

Observational data