Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                               2021 January 5

                         The Small Cloud of Magellan
                    Image Credit & Copyright: José Mtanous

   Explanation: What is the Small Magellanic Cloud? It has turned out to
   be a galaxy. People who have wondered about this little fuzzy patch in
   the southern sky included Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and
   his crew, who had plenty of time to study the unfamiliar night sky of
   the south during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth in the
   early 1500s. As a result, two celestial wonders easily visible for
   southern hemisphere skygazers are now known in Western culture as the
   Clouds of Magellan. Within the past 100 years, research has shown that
   these cosmic clouds are dwarf irregular galaxies, satellites of our
   larger spiral Milky Way Galaxy. The Small Magellanic Cloud actually
   spans 15,000 light-years or so and contains several hundred million
   stars. About 210,000 light-years away in the constellation of the Tucan
   (Tucana), it is more distant than other known Milky Way satellite
   galaxies, including the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy and the Large
   Magellanic Cloud. This sharp image also includes the foreground
   globular star cluster 47 Tucanae on the right.

                     Tomorrow's picture: streaking dunes
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