Large Magellanic Cloud

With monsoon season in full swing in AZ I went back to Telescope Live for data. This is the Large Magellanic Cloud, visible largely from the southern hemisphere. The LMC is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, sitting approximately 160,000 light years from it.

The stars we see in this image are mostly within the Milky Way. The LMC itself contains approximately 30 billion stars, but they show to us as a misty cloud. The LMC's mass is about 1/100 the Milky Way's. Its orbital period around the Milky Way is estimated at 1.5 billion years.