From the International Space Station, astronauts gaze upon a vast sea of stars, the view almost entirely unencumbered by Earth’s atmosphere. Their perspective on outer space, as it turns out, extends beyond the Milky Way.
Located about 160,000 light-years away, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is an irregular dwarf galaxy consisting of billions of stars. It appears as a bright smudge in this photo, which was taken by an astronaut aboard the station on November 28, 2025. Arcing across the bottom of the image is Earth’s limb, along with yellow, green, and diffuse red layers of airglow.
Skywatchers on Earth can also see this nearby galaxy from the Southern Hemisphere and from low Northern Hemisphere latitudes without optical aid. It is part of our Local Group, a galactic neighborhood about 10 million light-years across containing the Milky Way, Andromeda, and Triangulum galaxies, plus around 50 dwarf galaxies, including the LMC.
Although this parcel of space is visible with little or no technology, sophisticated instruments developed by NASA and others have captured extraordinary views of the LMC. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and a combination of missions show its stars and nebulae in different wavelengths.
The LMC is a hotbed of star formation, giving astronomers excellent opportunities to study the life cycle of stars and space dust. A supernova in 1987—the nearest observed in hundreds of years—offered a close-up look at the death of a star and its aftermath. The powerful explosion blazed with the power of 100 million Suns for several months, and scientists observed a bright ring of gas around the exploded star for decades.
More recently, astronomers studied how vast quantities of dust were being forged in the supernova’s glowing rem …