What's remarkable about this beautiful image is that it's literally a scene from another galaxy. It's a picture of the Tarantula Nebula, an H II region (a cloud of glowing gas and plasma) in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest galaxies to, in fact a satellite of, the Milky way. The nebula is an extremely bright object, if it were as close as the Orion Nebula, it would cast shadows. It's also the location of the nearest supernova since the invention of the telescope. This is an APOD image, click once for the APOD page, click the image there for a high-resolution version.
