A multitude of distant galaxies shine through the Large Magellanic Cloud

From our earthbound line of sight, the Large Magellanic Cloud is full of galactic interlopers… the ghostly glow of far distant galaxies shining through the Cloud. Like no other cosmic coincidence, those ghostly glows, each the collective glow of billions upon billions of stars that has travelled across time and space for hundreds of millions of years, and shining through another galaxy, demonstrate how vast our universe is, how complex it is, how mysterious it is, and how utterly spectacular.

Lying in the constellations Dorado, Mensa, Reticulum, Hydrus and Pictor, many of the galaxies appear in stunning LMC locations, sharing the field of view with gorgeous clusters and nebulae, but most of these background galaxies shine through the outer suburbs of the LMC along with its far flung globular clusters. (There are even a couple of quasars shining through the Cloud, one whose faint 16.8 mag light is lost among a plethora of faint stars; the other, a mag 16.3 droplet of exotic light that resides very close to NGC 2117.)

Included are the NGC-designated galaxies, some IC-designated ones, and some ESO- and PGC-designated ones that are either nicely visible through the Cloud or interestingly located. (And for those who like to chase down the faintest and fuzziest, there are a multitude of ESO-designated galaxies glimmering through the Cloud, too faint to include here.)

There are also a number of galaxy clusters that are visible through the Cloud but most of them are the territory of the very big telescopes. However, I have included the core of the rich galaxy cluster, ACO S585 as it has a wonderful selection of galaxies to view, among them four NGC galaxies.

The extraordinary Lindsay-Shapley Ring gets honorary mention although it lies just outside the LMC’s boundary! Not only is it a fabulous example of a galactic hit-and-run collision in which one galaxy plunges directly through the disk of another one and keeps on going, but also because Eric Lindsay and Harlow Shapley (whose SL clusters abound in the Cloud) discovered it in a cluster survey of the LMC, and believed it to be a nebulous oval and part of the LMC; not realising its true nature.