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irregular galaxy

Large Magellanic Cloud

A little galaxy that orbits ours — easy to see from the southern half of Earth.

Also called: the LMC.

🕒 When can I see it?🚀 Travel there
Large Magellanic Cloud — Drawn, not photographed.

What it is

Irregular dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, easily visible naked-eye from the Southern Hemisphere.

Irregular galaxy: No shape to speak of, usually because something pulled it about. Every kind of thing there is →

How to find the Large Magellanic Cloud

Look in the constellation Dorado/Mensa.

From the southern hemisphere, look in the summer.

Best Nov-Feb; essentially unreachable from mid-to-high northern latitudes.

The Planetarium works out where it actually is from your own place and the date — including whether it is above the horizon at all tonight.

What you will really see

With your own eyes

A soft, shapeless patch of haze — no clear shape at all.

🔭 See it drawn as it looks through a telescope
🖨️ A sheet to print for this
🖨️ Print a sheet and go and look
🖨️ Sheet to take outside →

Worth knowing about the Large Magellanic Cloud

On that same scale, the Large Magellanic Cloud would be about 163 meters away — just past the finish line of the Milky Way's own 100-meter track. Light takes 163 thousand years to get here from the Large Magellanic Cloud, so what you are looking at is the Large Magellanic Cloud as it was 163 thousand years ago.

What it is made of
An irregular dwarf galaxy — a small, shapeless companion orbiting the Milky Way, not a neat spiral or ellipse.
What makes it worth knowing
Contains the Tarantula Nebula (the most active star-forming region known nearby) and hosted supernova SN 1987A.
Its name and its story
Named after Ferdinand Magellan's crew, who logged it in 1519-1522 — though Aboriginal Australian and Polynesian traditions had their own stories about it for millennia before.
How did anyone measure the Earth in the first place?
The numbers
Across305 000 000 000 000 000 km (305 000 000.0 billion)
Distance from us163,000 light-years

How anyone knows this

Nobody flew a tape measure out there. Every number on this page was worked out from the ground:

Next to it

Andromeda Galaxy (M31)spiral galaxyNaked eyeTriangulum Galaxy (M33)spiral galaxyWith effortBode's Galaxy (M81)spiral galaxyWith effortWhirlpool Galaxy (M51)spiral galaxyWith effortSombrero Galaxy (M104)spiral galaxyWith effortPinwheel Galaxy (M101)spiral galaxyWith effort
📖 How the galaxies fit together

Then go outside

Clear tonight? The Planetarium will show you what is worth a look. Then just go out.

🌙 Plan an evening outside🌌 Everything else in the sky