Caption: SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

Features:

1. Modern supernova SN 1987A is the bright, pointy "star" near the center.

   It is pointy because it is so bright that it is overexposed and one can see its pointy diffraction pattern.

2. SN 1987A was the first discovered supernova of 1987: hence the name SN 1987A with A for first.

3. The LMC is a dwarf irregular galaxy that is in orbit around the Milky Way. In fact, the LMC is the prototype of its own galaxy type: the Magellanic spiral galaxies.

   The LMC is at distance ∼ 50 kiloparsecs.

4. Many (nearly all?) of the stars in this picture are foreground stars in the Milky Way.

5. The pink region is 30 Doradus, a bright H II region. The pink glow is Hα atomic spectral line emission from atomic hydrogen. 30 Doradus is also a star forming region and it extends farther than is seen in this image.

6. SN 1987A, in fact, occurred on the outskirts of 30 Doradus. This is to be expected. SN 1987A is a core-collapse supernova. Core-collapse supernovae are the explosions of stars of greater than about 8 solar masses at the end of their nuclear burning lives. Such massive stars live less than ∼ 10 million years, and so usually have no time to wander away from the star formation region where they were born. So the progenitor star of SN 1987A was almost certainly formed in 30 Doradus.

7. SN 1987A, the most famous of all modern supernovae, was discovered by Ian Shelton (1957--), the brother of yours truly's UNLV colleague David Shelton.