Little is as beguiling as countless stars spanning  stretches of the LMC, the glow of starlight resembling silvery night clouds

No photo can do a star cloud justice; even the most stunning image flattens the glut of bright, sparkling stars into an even flatness of shiny dots, whereas in the telescope, even the Cloud’s star clouds appear to shimmer with the multitudes of stars sparkling against the backdrop of unresolved starlight like a sterling silver backdrop scattered with diamonds.

Of the 122 OB associations Lucke and Hodge catalogued in their 1970 catalogue, they listed sixteen of the much larger ones – with dimensions up to an astounding ~1000 light-years in diameter – as star clouds. Some of them are absolutely absolutely dazzling!

It is remarkable what one finds in the star clouds – bright stars, faint stars, rare stars, oceans of unresolved starlight, mysteriously empty patches, chains, strings and loops of stars, glutted pockets of stars, open clusters, compact clusters, asterisms, gorgeous swathes of nebulosity… and in the largest star cloud of all one even finds superbubbles and a ferocious star-forming region! But above all, one finds unutterable beauty.

The huge and gorgeous LH 8 Star Cloud

One gets a profoundly different perspective of the open clusters that reside in a star cloud when you observe them “the other way around” – in other words, by first observing the star cloud as the singular object it is (its size, shape, boundaries, pageant of glittering stars and the locations of the clusters within it), and then examining each of the clusters individually. For instance, star cloud LH 8 is chock-a-block with stars and has eight open clusters within it, three of which are beautiful NGC clusters.

It is impossible to envision the volume of space the vast star clouds occupy. The star cloud LH 77, known as the Quadrant because it forms a perfect quarter part of a circle, spans an incredible ~980 light-years and is jam-packed with sparkling stars and clusters