Explanation:
The 16th century Portuguese navigator
Ferdinand
Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the
southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth.
As a result, two fuzzy cloud-like
objects easily visible to southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the
Clouds of Magellan,
now understood to be
satellite galaxies of our much larger, spiral Milky Way galaxy.
About 160,000 light-years distant in the constellation
Dorado,
the Large
Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is seen here in a remarkably detailed,
10
frame mosaic image.
Spanning about 30,000 light-years or so, it is
the most massive of the Milky Way's
satellite
galaxies and is the site of the
closest
supernova in modern times, SN 1987a.
The prominent reddish knot near the bottom is 30 Doradus, or the
Tarantula Nebula, a giant star-forming
region in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
To identify the location of the supernova and navigate your way
around the many star clusters and nebulae of the LMC, just consult this
well-labeled view.
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