Sunny Priyan
NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image 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.
The small Magellanic Cloud, primarily in the constellation Tucana, extends into Hydrus and is one of the few galaxies visible to the naked eye from Earth.
To viewers in the southern hemisphere and some northern latitudes, the SMC appears as a fragment of the Milky Way, though it is actually much farther away than any part of our own galaxy.
Hubble's 2.4-meter mirror and Wide Field Camera 3, using four filters, provide a far more detailed and vivid view of the SMC than what can be seen with the naked eye.
Each filter permits different wavelengths of light, creating a multicolored view of dust clouds drifting across a field of stars.
Hubble's zoomed-in view captures a distant region of the SMC near the center of NGC 346, a star cluster housing dozens of massive young stars.