Large Magellanic Cloud

Visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere; SN 1987A went off in it.

The picture hangs at that distance facing Earth, as large as it is on the sky; how deep the object is cannot be seen, so it is flat.

Taken by

Digitized Sky Survey

Picture spans

about 43,000 ly

From the Sun

163,000 light-years

RA / Dec

80.89° / -69.76°

Credit

Digitized Sky Survey 2 (STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, UKSTU/AAO), via CDS hips2fits

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a dwarf galaxy and satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of around 50 kiloparsecs, the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal and the possible dwarf irregular galaxy called the Canis Major Overdensity.

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