---
title: "Large Magellanic Cloud: facts, distance and size"
description: "The Large Magellanic Cloud is a small galaxy of billions of stars that orbits our Milky Way. Its size, distance, place on the route and sourced facts."
url: https://krilion.app/atlas/lmc
language: en-US
---

# Large Magellanic Cloud

Satellite galaxy. Depth 47 on the Krillion Space voyage, in the Galactic core and beyond.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a small galaxy of billions of stars that orbits our Milky Way. It is the most massive of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and a busy site of star birth, which makes it a nearby laboratory for studying how stars form and die.

![The Large Magellanic Cloud at depth 47 in Krillion Space, from a Spitzer infrared photo (NASA / JPL-Caltech / STScI).](https://krilion.app/assets/atlas/lmc.webp)

## Fact sheet

- **Type:** Dwarf irregular galaxy
- **Distance:** About 160,000 light-years from Earth
- **Size:** About 15,000 light-years across
- **Constellation:** Dorado
- **Position in the sky:** Right ascension 5h 23m, declination −69° 46′
- **Seeing it from Earth:** It is easy to see with the naked eye as a faint, cloud-like glow from the Southern Hemisphere and from low northern latitudes.
- **On the voyage:** Depth 47, in the Galactic core and beyond section of the route, between Sagittarius A* and the Andromeda Galaxy

## Things to know

- It is the most massive of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and is named after the 16th-century navigator Ferdinand Magellan, whose crew studied the southern sky on the first voyage around the world. ([NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2023-september-7-the-large-cloud-of-magellan/))
- Supernova 1987A, which exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, was the nearest supernova seen in hundreds of years and shone with the power of about 100 million Suns for several months. ([NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/the-galaxy-next-door/))
- Its Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus) is a giant star-forming region about 1,000 light-years across. ([NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2023-september-7-the-large-cloud-of-magellan/))
- A 2019 study used 20 eclipsing binary stars to measure the galaxy's distance to within about 1%, at roughly 49.6 kiloparsecs. ([arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08096))
- It is bright enough that astronauts on the International Space Station have photographed it as a hazy smudge above Earth. ([NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/the-galaxy-next-door/))

## Sources

- [NASA APOD – The Large Cloud of Magellan (2023 September 7)](https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2023-september-7-the-large-cloud-of-magellan/)
- [NASA Earth Observatory – The Galaxy Next Door](https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/the-galaxy-next-door/)
- [Pietrzyński et al. 2019, Nature 567, 200 – A distance to the LMC precise to one per cent (arXiv:1903.08096)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08096)

## On the route

- Previous landmark: [Sagittarius A*](https://krilion.app/atlas/sagittarius-a)
- Next landmark: [Andromeda Galaxy](https://krilion.app/atlas/andromeda)
- [The whole Star Atlas](https://krilion.app/atlas)
- [Fly the voyage yourself](https://krilion.app/d/): every right answer warps your ship one stop deeper.