The night sky glitters in infrared in this view by Japan's Akari observatory.

Built for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Akari is an infrared observatory launched in February to survey the sky in the infrared range of the light spectrum. Here, the observatory returns its first scan of the entire sky, including the largest wavelength coverage to date of the Milky Way’s Large Magellanic Cloud.

Located some 160,000 light-years away, the Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and contains about 10 thousand million stars. While that sounds like a lot, it’s only about one-tenth the stellar population of the Milky Way.

This false-color image, obtained by Akari’s Far-Infrared Surveyor instrument, shows the distribution of interstellar dust and gas throughout the Large Magellanic Cloud. The dust and gas forms a sort of spindle shape in the lower half of this image. Its illumination suggests a strong presence of star formation.

The Tarantula nebula, a bright region at the bottom left, is know as a productive star factory.

--SPACE.com Staff

Credit: JAXA