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The Large Magellanic Cloud, LMC, is a barred dwarf spiral galaxy that is being disrupted by the gravity is the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Milky Way. The LMC contains about 20 billion stars, spread over about 10 degrees in the long dimension and visually is easily seen in dark skies in the southern hemisphere, as a detached patch of the Milky Way.
The green areas in the image are due to oxygen emission. Apparently the tidal disruption has spurred a lot of new star formation, creating many young hot blue stars.
This image was obtained from along the Great Ocean Road in Australia. Visually, both the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds were easly visible.
Technical. This image was obtained with a stock Canon EOS R5 Mirrorless Digital Camera, and a Canon 200 mm f/2.8 L lens at f/2.8 and ISO 1600. No dark frame subtraction, no flat fields, and no bias measured because they were not needed. The camera suppresses dark current, Bias is a single value for all pixels and is stored in the EXIF data with each image, and the flat field is in the lens profile used in the raw converter (photoshop). Total exposure time was 60 minutes from 120 30-second exposures. Tracking with a Fornax Lightrack II and no guiding.
This is a natural color image. The raw data were converted with Photoshop Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) with full calibration that included the color correction matrix and hue corrections usually skipped in the traditional astro workflows. Color managed workflow in Adobe RGB color space. Stretched with rnc-color-stretch, and final adjustments in photoshop. This is a highly calibrated image, presented in sRGB color space.
Original plate scale = 4.5 arc-seconds per pixel.
The image here is at 20 arc-seconds / pixel.
The Exposure Factors, CEF, CEFA are measures of the relative amounts of light received from a subject. It can be used to fairly compare wildly different lens/telescope apertures and exposure times. For this image the, total exposure time yielded:
Modern digital cameras like the Canon R5 include on sensor dark current suppression technology and low fixed pattern noise at ISOs around 800 and higher, making no need for dark frame subtraction. Modern raw converters correct for light fall-off and also correct for hot/dead/stuck pixels. This makes processing low light images easy: simply align and average.
Also see Astrophotography Image Processing Basic Work Flow.
To learn how to obtain stunning images like this, please visit my Extensive Articles on Photography .
Keywords to this image = astrophoto-1 galaxy night low-light digital_astro australia canon_r5 rnc-color-stretch NEW
Image ID: lmc-200mm-c04-23-2025-30sec-rnclark-av120-e-1800s.jpg
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Last updated April 28, 2025