Sitting outside the Milky Way in the Large Magellanic Cloud is the Tarantula nebula, containing the most active region of star formation in our local region of the universe.

Even though the nebula is 170,000 light-years away, Tarantula can be seen clearly by the naked eye as a large milky patch in the southern sky. Astronomers believe the nebula, also known as 60 Doradus, is going through a particularly violent period in its life cycle after several close encounters with our own Milky Way galaxy. Those encounters may have spurred the Tarantula's energetic star formation. One light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

This mosaic of Tarantula images was taken by the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope, which recorded more than 1,000 images and spectra of the object and stored them in a science archive in Munich, Germany.

But it was amateur astronomer, 23-year-old Danny LaCrue, who found that 15 separate images taken by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 could be assembled into the single mosaic of Tarantula's central region seen here. LaCrue used the publicly available software tool FITS Liberator, which was released six months ago.

"I always wondered what it would be like to create the pictures from Hubble, but I never imagined that I would one day actually get to make one myself," LaCrue said.

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: ESA/NASA, ESO and Danny LaCrue

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