NGC 220, in the Small Magellanic Cloud,DR350

 NGC 220, In the Small Magellanic Cloud  What is the Small Magellanic Cloud? It has turned out to be a galaxy. People who have wonder Clouded about this little fuzzy patch in the southern sky included Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan his crew, who had plenty of time to study the unfamiliar night sky of the south during the first circumnavigation of earth in the early 1500s. As a result, two celestial 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 of the 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 Tucana, it is more distant than other known Milky Way Galaxies, including the Sagittarius galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud. The larger image of the entire Magellanic Cloud is a mosaic of four separate images taken by the 14″ Planewave DR350 telescope by Martin Pugh in Australina and processed by Michael Adler.

This image has been cropped to show the section around the lower center of the larger image. It captures the nebula known as NGC 220 which is the bluish area in the left center of this image.  The image is in narrowband using atomic filters that capture Hydrogen emissions shown in red and Oxygen emissions shown in blue.