[14] With a declination of about −70°, the LMC is visible as a faint "cloud" from the southern hemisphere of the Earth and from as far north as 20° N. It straddles the constellations Dorado and Mensa and has an apparent length of about 10° to the naked eye, 20 times the Moon's diameter, from dark sites away from light pollution.

[15] Both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds have been easily visible for southern nighttime observers well back into prehistory.

It has been claimed that the first known written mention of the Large Magellanic Cloud was by the Persian astronomer 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi Shirazi (later known in Europe as "Azophi"), which he referred to as Al Bakr, the White Ox, in his Book of Fixed Stars around 964 AD.

[18] The galaxy and southern end of Dorado are in the current epoch at opposition on about 5 December when thus visible from sunset to sunrise from equatorial points such as Ecuador, the Congos, Uganda, Kenya and Indonesia and for part of the night in nearby months.

Measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope, announced in 2006, suggest the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds may be moving too quickly to be orbiting the Milky Way.

[24] The central bar, with a radius of 6,900 light-years (2.13 kpc) and a position angle of about 121°,[25] seems to be warped so that the east and west ends are nearer the Milky Way than the middle.

However, in 1986, Caldwell and Coulson[28] found that field Cepheid variables in the northeast lie closer to the Milky Way than those in the southwest.

The results of a study using late-type eclipsing binaries to determine the distance more accurately was published in the scientific journal Nature in March 2013.

[2] Like many irregular galaxies, the LMC is rich in gas and dust, and is currently undergoing vigorous star formation activity.

The LMC has a wide range of galactic objects and phenomena that make it known as an "astronomical treasure-house, a great celestial laboratory for the study of the growth and evolution of the stars", per Robert Burnham Jr.[39] Surveys of the galaxy have found roughly 60 globular clusters, 400 planetary nebulae and 700 open clusters, along with hundreds of thousands of giant and supergiant stars.

[41] A bridge of gas connects the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) with the LMC, which evinces tidal interaction between the galaxies.

[43] The Magellanic Clouds have a common envelope of neutral hydrogen, indicating that they have been gravitationally bound for a long time.

[44] The Large Magellanic Cloud has a supermassive black hole at its center, estimated to have 630,000+370,000−380,000 times the mass of the Sun.

21 hypervelocity stars have been discovered within the Milky Way's halo, which are thought to have been ejected from the Large Magellanic Cloud after gravitational interaction with this black hole via the Hills mechanism.

[48] An X-ray astronomy instrument was carried aboard a Thor missile launched from the same atoll on September 24, 1970, at 12:54 UTC and altitudes above 300 km (190 mi), to search for the Small Magellanic Cloud and to extend observation of the LMC.