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Hubble Captures a Neighbor’s Colorful Clouds An area of space filled with stars. Most of the stars are small, distant dots in a range of orange colors; closer stars shine with a bright glow and hold four thin diffraction spikes around them. These closer stars appear both bluish and reddish. Clouds from a nebula cover the left half of the scene, giving it a blue-greenish cast. More pieces of cloud also drift over the black background of space on the right side of the image. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features part of the Small Magellanic Cloud. ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
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Say hello to one of the Milky Way’s neighbors! This 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. Most of the galaxy resides in the constellation Tucana, but a small section crosses over into the neighboring constellation Hydrus.

Thanks to its proximity, the SMC is one of only a few galaxies that are visible 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-meter mirror 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 to observe this scene through four different filters. Each filter permits different wavelengths of light, creating a multicolored view of dust clouds drifting across a field of stars. Hubble’s view, however, is much more zoomed-in than our eyes, allowing it to observe very distant objects. This image captures a small region of the SMC near the center of NGC 346, a star cluster that is home to dozens of massive young stars.

Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD

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Details Last Updated Mar 21, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms Hubble Space Telescope Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Galaxies Goddard Space Flight Center Magellanic Clouds The Universe

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