Colourful clouds of a nearby neighbour

Say hello to one of the Milky Way’s neighbours! Today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features a scene from one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy located about 200 000 light-years away. Most of the galaxy resides in the constellation Tucana, but a small section crosses over into the neighbouring constellation Hydrus.

Thanks to its proximity, the SMC is one of only a few galaxies that can be seen from Earth without the help of a telescope or binoculars. For viewers in the southern hemisphere and some latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the SMC resembles a piece of the Milky Way that has broken off, though in reality it’s much farther away than any part of our own galaxy.

With its 2.4-metre ‘eye’ and sensitive instruments, Hubble’s view of the SMC is far more detailed and vivid than what humans can see. Researchers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument to observe this scene through four different filters. Each filter admits different wavelengths of light, creating a multicoloured view of dust clouds drifting across a field of stars. Hubble’s view, however, is much more zoomed-in than our eyes, the better for it to observe very distant objects. This image captures a small region of the SMC near the centre of NGC 346, a star cluster that is home to dozens of massive young stars.

[Image Description: An area of space that is filled with stars. Most of the stars are small, distant dots in orange colours; closer stars shine with a bright glow and four thin spikes around them. These closer stars appear in both bluish and reddish colours. Clouds from a nebula cover the left half of the scene, giving it a blue-greenish cast. More pieces of cloud drift over the black background of space on the right.]

Links

Credit:

ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray

About the Image

Id:potw2511a
Type:Observation
Release date:17 March 2025, 06:00
Size:4008 x 4081 px

About the Object

Name:SMC 13
Distance:200000 light years
Constellation:Tucana
Category:Galaxies

Image Formats

r.titleLarge JPEG
8.9 MB
r.titleScreensize JPEG
591.8 KB

Zoomable


Wallpapers

r.title1024x768
602.8 KB
r.title1280x1024
926.6 KB
r.title1600x1200
1.2 MB
r.title1920x1200
1.4 MB
r.title2048x1536
1.9 MB

Coordinates

Position (RA):0 59 43.66
Position (Dec):-72° 10' 26.12"
Field of view:2.64 x 2.69 arcminutes
Orientation:North is 181.5° left of vertical


Colours & filters

BandWavelengthTelescope
Ultraviolet
UV
275 nm Hubble Space Telescope
WFC3
Optical
U
336 nm Hubble Space Telescope
WFC3
Optical
g
475 nm Hubble Space Telescope
WFC3
Optical
I
814 nm Hubble Space Telescope
WFC3
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