Say hello to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), one of the Milky Way's closest neighbors! Located about 200,000 light-years away, this dwarf galaxy is close enough to be visible from Earth without the help of a telescope or binoculars. At certain latitudes in the Southern and Northern hemispheres, the SMC looks like a fragment of the Milky Way in the sky, but it is actually a much more distant galaxy.

This image shows the SMC in much more detail than we see with the naked eye. NASA Hubble's Wide Field Camera passed the galaxy through four different filters, capturing light at different wavelengths. This clearly revealed colorful clouds of dust floating in a field full of stars. In the image, the Hubble telescope focuses on a small region of the SMC, revealing a star cluster with dozens of massive young stars.

Image description:

A space field full of stars. Most of the stars are a series of small, distant dots of orange color; the closer stars shine with a bright glow and have four thin diffraction spikes around them. These closer stars appear both bluish and reddish. Clouds from a nebula cover the left half of the scene, giving it a blue-greenish color. More clouds drift over the black background of space on the right side of the image.

Doesn't our nearest neighbor look beautiful? Let's wave!