This image was the astronomy picture of the day on October 16th and it depicts the large cloud of Magellan. Unfortunately, this cloud and its brother the Small Cloud of Magellan are visible to the Southern hemisphere only. The Large Magellan Cloud is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way named after who but Ferdinand Magellan, the Spanish explorer who discovered it during his trip around the world in 1519. The LMC is about 180,000 lightyears distant and resides in the constellation, Dorado. Also depicted in this photo in the top left is the Tarantula Nebula, a vast star forming region that spans 1,000 lightyeas across.
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