The 16th century Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two fuzzy cloud-like objects easily visible to southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the Clouds of Magellan, now understood to be satellite galaxies of our much larger, spiral Milky Way galaxy. About 160,000 light-years distant in the constellation Dorado, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is seen here in a remarkably deep, colorful composite image, starlight from the central bluish bar contrasting with the telltale reddish glow of ionized atomic hydrogen gas. Spanning about 15,000 light-years or so, it is the most massive of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and is the home of the closest supernova in modern times, SN 1987A. The prominent patch at top left is 30 Doradus, also known as the magnificent Tarantula Nebula. The giant star-forming region is about 1,000 light-years across and is the largest and most complex star forming region in the entire galactic neighborhood. Were it placed at the distance of Milky Way's Orion Nebula, only 1,500 light-years distant and the nearest stellar nursery to Earth, it would appear to cover about 30 degrees (60 full moons) on the sky. Intriguing details of the nebula are visible in the above image shown in composite narrowband and RGB "true colors". The spindly arms of the Tarantula nebula surround NGC 2070, a star cluster that contains some of the brightest, most massive stars known, visible in blue in the image center. Since massive stars live fast and die young, it is not so surprising that the cosmic Tarantula also lies near the site of a close recent supernova (text adapted from APOD). Apo TEC140 (140/f7.2) - FLI Proline 16803 - Ha (300m) OIII (300m) L (180m) R (120m) G (120m) B (150m) - Warrumbungle Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia
Cometary Globule 12 is a high latitude low mass star forming region associated with the young cluster and reflection nebula NGC 5367. While the cluster and associated nebula were discovered by John Herschel in 1834, the cometary globule was discovered only in 1976 on an ESO/SRC Sky Survey plate taken with the UK Schmidt telescope. It is estimated to be about 600 pc away, toward the constellation of Centaurus. Cometary globules are known stellar bithplaces that show a head–tail morphology similar to comets. Their heads are dusty, compact and bright-rimmed. A faintly luminous tail extending from the head generally points away from a nearby bright early-type star. CG12 is not only unusual because its isolated location far from the galactic plane, but Chandra also discovered more than 50 new young stars in CG12 with their age and stellar distributions inconsistent with the simple radiation driven implosion model that is believed to be a major triggering process of star formation in many cometary clouds. Apo TEC140 (140/f7.2) - FLI Proline 16803 - L (300m) R (130m) G (130m) B (130m) - Warrumbungle Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia
