When, in July 1054, light reached Earth from the explosion of the massive star that was the ancestor of the Crab Pulsar, the imperial court astronomers of ChinaΓÇÖs Sung Dynasty immediately noticed it. These observant early scientists described a brilliant ΓÇ£guest starΓÇ¥ that suddenly appeared in the area of the sky corresponding to the European constellation Taurus. Their description of the starΓÇÖs location makes it very likely that what they saw was indeed the Crab supernova. Although there are no existing European records of the event, Native American pictographs made around the same time in northern Arizona depict a crescent Moon and bright star in approximately the same relation to each other as the Moon and
