The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that orbits our Milky Way at distance of roughly 160,000 light years. It can be seen by the naked eye from the southern hemisphere... but not like this! Combining images from ESA's Herschel observatory with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, this image shows the incredibly complex system of dust in the galaxy glowing in the far infrared.

Bright clumps are where stars are forming; the big one on the left is the Tarantula Nebula, one of the largest and most active stellar nurseries known. However, there are many places where stars are being churned out in the LMC, which is one of the reasons astronomers study it so intently.

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Credit:  ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI