This gorgeous image of the Large Magellanic Cloud is a wide-field view that’s superior to any professional image or mosaic taken of the same region of sky. With a total of 1060 hours of observational time, the details and extent of the gas revealed supersedes any professional view of the same entire region of sky. (Credit: Ciel Austral: J.-C. Cannone, P. Berhnard, D. Chaplain, N. Outters & L. Bourgon)

The Milky Way’s nearest galaxy, as seen through amateur eyes

Professional astronomy images are the gold standard. But this Large Magellanic Cloud composite is the amateur community’s best image ever.

The Universe is full of astronomical wonders, but it’s up to humanity to observe and analyze them.

The Large (top right) and Small (lower left) Magellanic Clouds are visible in the southern skies, and helped guide Magellan on his famous voyage some 500 years ago. In reality, the LMC is located some 160–165,000 light-years away, with the SMC slightly farther at 198,000 light-years. (Credit: ESO/S. Brunier)

The key factors determining what we can reveal are resolution, light-gathering power, and the wavelengths filters we choose.

This photo of the Hubble Space telescope being deployed, on April 25. 1990, was taken by the IMAX Cargo Bay Camera (ICBC) mounted aboard the space shuttle Discovery. It has been operational for 29 years, and has not been serviced since 2009. With a 2.4-meter diameter mirror, it gathers as much light in 1 minute as a 160-mm (6.3″) telescope would require 3 hours and 45 minutes to gather. (Credit: NASA/Smithsonian Institution/Lockheed Corporation)

Professionals have larger, more powerful telescopes with superior instruments, but amateurs have the advantage of time.

This view of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) was taken by the Digitized Sky Survey: a professional survey using a variety of telescopes comprising the entire sky. The small, high-resolution inset is a view of a particular globular cluster’s stars that is itself a satellite of the LMC. This professional image has less information and fewer details than the amateur mosaic composed by the Ciel Austral team. (Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (STScI/JHU), and Palomar Digitized Sky Survey)

Observing an object for four times as long gathers as much light as a telescope twice as large.