From the ground, the night sky can feel limitless, but it’s also filtered through a blanket of air that softens and scatters starlight. From orbit, that veil drops away, as astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) saw firsthand on Nov 28, 2025. They were treated to a view of the phenomenon called airglow, along with a glimpse of one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors. A member of the ISS’ Expedition 73 crew captured the image with a Nikon Z9 camera with a 50-millimeter focal length.
The bright, blurry patch near the center of the image is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy located about 160,000 light-years from Earth. It’s close enough to be a familiar sight to skywatchers in the Southern Hemisphere, where it appears as a pale smudge to the naked eye.
What is it?
This image captures two very different kinds of glow at once. Along the bottom edge of the frame, Earth’s horizon arcs in bright blue, capped with layered bands of yellow, green and faint red light. Those luminous layers are airglow, a natural shimmer produced when atoms and molecules high in Earth’s atmosphere release energy after being excited by sunlight and chemical reactions.
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Above that thin, glowing edge, the star field opens up, and sitting among the points of light is the Large Magellanic Cloud, an irregular dwarf galaxy containing billions of stars. It looks soft and cloud-like not because it’s made of vapor, but because it’s so densely packed with stars, gas, and nebulae that our eyes (and even cameras at modest focal lengths) blend many of its lights into a bright haze.
NIKON Z9
(Image credit: Amazon)
The astronauts aboard the ISS used a Nikon Z9camera to capture this image. This camera is ideal for astrophotographers wanting quality, reliable and high-resolution stills of celestial objects. For a more in-depth look, see our Nikon Z9 review.
Where is it?
The photograph was taken from the International Space Station, which orbits Earth at an average altitude of 248 miles (400 kilometers).
The purple shape in the center of the image is the Large Magellanic Cloud, seen through the reddish hue of airglow produced by Earth’s atmosphere. (Image credit: NASA’s Expedition 73 crew)Why is it amazing?
The LMC is more than a photogenic companion to the airglow spotted in this image. It’s a hotbed of star formation, full of bright nebulae and turbulent clouds where new stars are being born. Because it’s close and relatively unobscured compared with many regions of the Milky Way‘s crowded disk, astronomers use it as a natural laboratory for studying how stars and the dust between them evolve over time. Observing star-forming regions in another galaxy helps researchers test whether the processes we see in our own neighborhood play out the same way under slightly different conditions.
The LMC’s scientific importance is anchored by one of the most famous stellar events of the modern era: Supernova 1987A, the closest observed supernova in hundreds of years. That explosion briefly blazed with astonishing intensity and gave scientists a rare chance to watch the aftermath unfold in detail for decades. Over time, observations revealed how the blast interacted with surrounding material, including a bright ring of gas that continued to glow as it was energized by the shock wave. More recently, astronomers have studied how large quantities of dust formed in the supernova’s expanding remains — material that can later become the raw ingredient for new stars and planets.
Want to learn more?
You can learn more about supernovae and the Large Magellanic Cloud.