Swimming in a starry lagoon

Credit: NASA/ESA and the Hub­ble Her­itage Team (AURA/STScI)/HEIC

Swim­ming in a starry lagoon 160,000 light-years from Earth toward the south­ern con­stel­la­tion Doradus, I see the head and fins of a giant tur­tle. When you explore the image, the blue stars form the halo around the turtle’s head. Can you find other pat­terns in the star cloud?

N11B, part of a huge star-forming region in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud, is shown in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. N11 is sec­ond the sec­ond largest star-making region in the LMC, sec­ond only to 30 Doradus.

Explore the giant gas clouds of our neigh­bor­ing galaxy. Just above the cen­ter and to the left is a dense area of young, hot blue stars. Can you find other blue star clus­ters? Bok glob­ules, inky blobs of gas and dust where new stars may be form­ing dot the land­scape. Red­dish clouds, glow­ing because the intense radi­a­tion from the hot stars causes the gas atoms to become excited and glow.