  We present the XMM-Newton first light image, taken in January 2000 with the
EPIC pn camera during the instrument's commissioning phase, when XMM-Newton was
pointing towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The field is rich in
different kinds of X-ray sources: point sources, supernova remnants (SNRs) and
diffuse X-ray emission from LMC interstellar gas. The observations are of
unprecedented sensitivity, reaching a few 10^32 erg/s for point sources in the
LMC. We describe how these data sets were analysed and discuss some of the
spectroscopic results. For the SNR N157B the power law spectrum is clearly
steeper than previously determined from ROSAT and ASCA data. The existence of a
significant thermal component is evident and suggests that N157B is not a
Crab-like but a composite SNR. Most puzzling is the spectrum of the LMC hot
interstellar medium, which indicates a significant overabundance of Ne and Mg
of a few times solar.
