Resolving Stars in 30 Doradus The Melnick 34 region viewed by: The HST's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 The original Wide Field Planetary Camera The European Southern Observatory The Human Eye Despite its tremendous luminosity, we cannot see Melnick 34 or any of the stars around it by eye. Unaided eyes cannot resolve such fine detail - they would just detect a star image that filled the whole field. Our eyes detect as points of light only the more luminous, nearby stars - those within two or three thousand light years of the Sun. On dark nights, our eyes see the collective light from the billions of stars in the Magellanic clouds as soft, milky glows.

The Melnick 34 field above is only a third of a minute across - one hundredth the diameter of the moon. (The arrow indicates a similar sized region on the Moon).

The giant star-forming region, 30 Doradus is found in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, 160,000 light years from us. One of the stars found there is Melnick 34, a brilliant Wolf-Rayet star, thousands of times more luminous than the Sun. The image above shows a region of sky round Melnick 34. Over one hundred stars of similar luminosity to the Sun are found in the same field.