Cosmic beauty. The Magellanic Cloud fascinates astronomers and the lay public alike

Even when I was five years old, I was looking at the sky trying to find out exactly what those tiny luminous objects on the pitch-black panorama meant. One day there were more, then less. And sometimes they were lost completely. You can explain to your little one what the stars really are, but you probably won’t be heard until you visit the planetarium. Everyone’s jaw will drop there.

If I had to choose one single object that I am attracted to because of its strength and power, I would feel like someone who would be unfair and discriminate. We cannot live without the Sun, the Earth is a matter of course, and the rest of the solar system will quickly become commonplace. However, with the first images from the Hubble (and later Webb) telescope, I became more and more enthusiastic about galaxies and nebulae. The most beautiful and admired galaxy by many is the so-called Large Magellanic Cloud, an irregular galaxy adjacent to the Milky Way. It got its name after the Portuguese navigator Fernando Magellan and is so clear that it was already described in 964 in Persia.

It offers us its beauty and exceptionality through several interesting objects – for example, the nebula called Tarantula, which very strikingly resembles a giant spider, is itself a thousand light years across. Supernova 1987A is then the first such well-documented supernova of its kind.

Astronomer Benjamin Armstrong, however, points out one more interesting fact. The clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud are either too old or too young. The poetic soul could thus easily see the parable of the alternation of generations.

Although it is so close in the field of view of the telescope at the observatory, appearances are deceiving. The universe likes to distort, like when I was a child investigating what those tiny glowing dots were. This galaxy is 160,000 light-years away from Earth, which is hardly an imaginable measure considering that one light-year is an estimated ten trillion kilometers.