This is an image I created of the central region of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), also known as PTC 17223, one of our nearest galactic neighbors, “only” about 157,000 light-years from earth and until recently, thought to be a satellite of our own Milky Way. In 2007, Hubble Telescope observations showed that it is moving too fast to be in orbit around our galaxy and is likely to merge, perhaps quite violently, with the Milky Way in about two billion years. The LMC is, like our own, a barred spiral galaxy, seen nearly edge-on when viewed from earth. 

It is clearly visible to the naked eye in dark sky areas of the southern hemisphere. Persian astronomer, Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi first recorded it in 964 CE, referring to it as “Al Bakar” (the White Ox). Amerigo Vespucci noted it in his journal in 1504, but it was not widely known in Western Europe until written about by Ferdinand Magellan who observed it during his circumglobal journey in 1519. It has a diameter of about 14,000 light-years and contains about 10 billion solar masses, making it about 1/10 as massive as our home galaxy. It contains all the object types seen in the Milky Way, including several black holes, many observed planets, and a very disproportionally large number of star-forming nebulae, likely caused by the gravitational distortions generated by its proximity to the Milky Way. Those areas include the Tarantula Nebula, which is among the most active regions of star formation known, seen in the lower left center of this image. 

This image is composed of about 40 hours of mostly 600-second exposures in luminance, red, green, and blue, captured through a Takahashi FSQ-106ED telescope with an aperture of 106mm and a focal length of 283mm, using an FLI PL16803 camera mounted on a Paramount MX+ by the Telescope Live facility at the Heaven’s Mirror Observatory, near Yass, NSW, Australia in 2021 and January 2022. The data was downloaded, sorted, calibrated, integrated, balanced, and tuned by Jeffrey McClure in Salado. TX to create this image using Astro Pixel Processor v 1.83.2 with final adjustments in Adobe Lightroom Classic v. 10.4, January 28-31, 2022