Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)

Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way Galaxy. It is a dwarf irregular galaxy about 200 KLY distant. It is only visible in the southern hemisphere but can be seen naked eye on a dark night. It straddles the constellations Dorado and Mensa.

The galaxy contains vast clouds of hydrogen gas that slowly collapses to form new stars. The image shows these nebulous star forming regions glowing in red. The brown nebulous regions are dust clouds. The bright blue stars in the image are massive blue stars with short lifespans on the order of hundreds of thousands of years. The yellow stars are cooler stars like our sun and have a long lifespan on the order of ten billion years or more. (NASA.gov)

Image processed by Andrew Macica, original data from Telescope Live.

Imaging Details:

Observatory: Heaven's Mirror Observatory, Yass, Australia

Telescope: Takahashi FSQ-106ED

Aperture: 106 mm (4.17 inches), f/3.6

Focal Length: 382 mm (with 0.73x focal reducer)

Camera: FLI ProLine PL16803 CCD

Filters: LRGB

Total Exposure: 36 hours 25 minutes

Image Processing: PixInsight 1.8.9-3 Ripley (x64);

BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, StarXTerminator (RC Astro);

Adobe Photoshop 12.5.1;

Adobe Lightroom Classic 14.1.1

Instruction on PixInsight from Adam Block Studios.

Compared to the next image, this image had additional processing done on it to draw greater attention to the galaxy and deemphasize foreground stars from the Milky Way galaxy (up-sampled, drizzle, and deconvolution).