Large Magellanic Cloud
ILLUSTRATION FROM HUBBLE TYPE SBm · SURFACE BRIGHTNESS 23.4 MAG/ARCSEC² · MAJOR AXIS 646′ · AXIS RATIO 0.85 · POSITION ANGLE 170°
OVERVIEW
] GALAXYLarge Magellanic Cloud is a barred spiral galaxy SBm in the constellation Dorado, 161 700 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 0.29 (). Other catalogues list it as Nubecula Major, ESO-LV 561150 and IRAS 05240-6948, among 6 designations in total.
The largest of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies, a naked-eye cloud of the southern sky and the anchor of the cosmic distance ladder: twenty eclipsing binary pairs fix its distance to one percent, and the Cepheid calibration behind every larger distance builds on it. It hosted SN 1987A, the nearest supernova observed in four centuries.
- WHAT IT IS
- Barred spiral galaxy
- HOW FAR
- 161 700
- HOW BIG ON THE SKY
- 10.77
- HOW BRIGHT (V)
The light arriving now left it that long ago.
About 21 full Moons wide.
Bright enough for the naked eye, under a sky dark enough.
THE MODEL
] LIGHT ALONG THE RAYCALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · ANGULAR SIZE AT THE CATALOGUED DISTANCE · HUBBLE TYPE SBm · SURFACE BRIGHTNESS 23.4 MAG/ARCSEC² · MAJOR AXIS 646′ · AXIS RATIO 0.85 · POSITION ANGLE 170° · NO SURFACE — DRAWN AS A VOLUME · AXIS RATIO READ AS AN INCLINATION
The same disc, with the bar its classification records across the middle and the arms starting from the bar's ends rather than from the centre. The shape of it is the catalogued morphology; the tilt is the catalogued axis ratio read as an inclination, which is what a round disc's axis ratio is. Nothing measured the depth — a disc that looks this elliptical from the Sun is this far over, and the model is that disc seen from wherever you turn it to. The two colours are two populations: old stars in the bulge and the disc, young ones in the arms, both through the same blackbody table as the star pages. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, drawn from where the camera actually is — but every one of them is within 170 parsecs of the Sun and this object is much further out, so from here that whole neighbourhood is a knot in one direction and the rest of the sky is empty. The view you land on looks the other way; turn back towards the Sun and the stars come with it. What the readout says is which of the two the frame is pointed at. The emptiness is not a missing backdrop — it is the edge of what this catalogue has measured.
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see Large Magellanic Cloud for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.
Say where you are, and this line says when Large Magellanic Cloud is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEBright enough to pick out with your eyes alone, and from a lit street as well as a dark one. Large Magellanic Cloud covers 10.77° of sky against a of 1.08°, so at 48× it is wider than the field — sweep across it.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- SIZE ON THE SKY
- 10.77
- FILLS OF THE FIELD
- more than 100% of the width
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 0.29 · within reach
Large Magellanic Cloud is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 10.77° of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first — spread out, it comes to 23.4 . Catalogued sizes are measured to a photographic contour, and the part an eye sees is usually smaller.
APPARENT PLACE
] EQUINOX J2026.8Where a telescope has to be pointed today, which is not quite where the catalogue records the object: the coordinate grid itself has turned since the year 2000 the catalogue is referred to.
- RIGHT ASCENSION
- DECLINATION
- GRID TURNED SINCE
- 1.9
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-10-11 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for Large Magellanic Cloud, so nothing here moves the object; what separates this from the catalogued position above is the coordinate grid turning under it — about fifty arcseconds a year of precession since 2000, and the small nodding of the Earth’s axis on top of that. The catalogue it came from publishes no error for that position, so nothing here says how far this arithmetic can be trusted — the digits above are as precise as the place they were computed from, and no more. Aberration, parallax and refraction are left out. Aberration swings every position by up to twenty arcseconds over a year; parallax stays under an arcsecond for all but the nearest stars; refraction is nothing overhead and about half a degree at the horizon, where it answers to the air, not the sky. The same figure for any date.
CATALOG DATA
] 11 FIELDSThe raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.
WHAT KIND OF THING IT IS
What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.
- Hubble type
HOW BRIGHT IT IS
What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.
- Apparent magnitude ()
- Apparent magnitude ()
- Surface brightness
- 23.45
WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES
Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.
- 262
- Redshift (z)
- Redshift (z, CMB frame)
- Major axis
- 646
- Minor axis
- 550
- 170
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- OpenNGC type code
- G
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 6 DESIGNATIONS- Common name Large Magellanic Cloud
- Common name Nubecula Major
- ESO-LV ESO-LV 561150
- IRAS IRAS 05240-6948
- OpenNGC ESO056-115
- PGC PGC 17223
LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE
] 4 SERVICESEach link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.
- SIMBADPGC 17223
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- NEDPGC 17223
Redshift-independent distances, photometry across the spectrum and the extragalactic literature.
- ADSobject:"PGC 17223"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR600″ around 80.8938 -69.7561
Every published table with a row at this position, searched by coordinates rather than by name.
CITE THIS PAGE
] DR1This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.
SpaceCatalog. Large Magellanic Cloud [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/eso056-115
@misc{spacecatalog_eso056-115,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Large Magellanic Cloud}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/eso056-115},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from OpenNGC.}
}The values above were taken from OpenNGC — CC-BY-SA-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue, and its licence is share-alike: the terms reach whatever you build from these rows.
That catalogue asks for this acknowledgement: OpenNGC, Mattia Verga (github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC). Fields derived from it stay under CC BY-SA 4.0.
RECENT ACTIVITY
] 6 ITEMS- Discovery of Hidden Extragalactic Pulsars in the Parkes Archival Data2026-10-08 · arXiv · PAPER · Rahul Sengar, Laila Vleeschower, Matthew Bailes, Fronefield Crawford, Duncan R. Lorimer, Joshua P. Ridley
- Radio Continuum Study of One of the Brightest Large Magellanic Cloud Supernova Remnants N 132D2026-10-08 · arXiv · PAPER · Rami Z. E. Alsaberi, Zachary J. Smeaton, Miroslav D. Filipovic, Roland Kothes, Hidetoshi Sano, Ahmed H. Abdullah
- ALMA Observations of Molecular Complexity in the Large Magellanic Cloud: The N83 Star-Forming Region2026-10-04 · arXiv · PAPER · Marta Sewiło, Amanda Broadmeadow, Roya Hamedani Golshan, Steven B. Charnley, Lee Mundy, Kazuki Tokuda
- Superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud2026-09-08 · NASA · MISSION UPDATE
- Superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud2026-09-08 · NASA · RELEASE
- Hubble's superbubble scene2026-09-03 · ESA · RELEASE
arXiv · NASA · ESA · UPDATED DAILY