The bar is extraordinarily beautiful; a vast, bright, pearly-silver shimmer, gossamer and ethereal, and teeming with a multitude of objects big and small, complex and modest, bright and faint. Among its showcase treasures are a pair of bright superbubbles (N103 and N105) and a sequence of utterly gorgeous medium-sized star-forming regions (N113, N114, N119, and N120). Clusters by the dozen, globular clusters, sparkling OB associations, and some other superb little treasures, make a journey down the shimmering bar an indescribable observing experience (not to mention the thrill of knowing that one is actually traversing the bar of a galaxy). However, glorious as the bar’s lustre is in the telescope, it certainly interferes with observations of the objects buried in its opulent fields of glittering diamond dust.

According to A. Laval et al (1992) N103, N105, N113, N114, N119, N120 and N143 are seen projected against the LMC bar. They wrote, “However, we think that those nebulae do not belong to the bar and that instead, they are foreground nebulae as the UV map of Smith et al (1987) shows. Indeed, in that photograph, these regions appear to be part of a spiral arm best seen at the UV wavelengths.”