Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 292,DR350

The Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 292  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 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.There are numerous star clusters in the image, the most prominant one is in the lower center of the image and is known as NGC 220 and can be seen as the preceding image in more detail by using the previous button. The image is a mosaic of four separate images taken by the 14″ Planewave DR350 telescope by Martin Pugh in Australia and processed by Michael Adler. The image is in narrowband using atomic filters that captures Hydrogen emissions shown in red and Oxygen emissions shown in blue. The image minimizes the very small stars to provide more detail in the gas and dust clouds.