Small Magellanic Cloud

Beside the Large Magellanic Cloud, it appears in the southern sky as a second, slightly smaller and fainter hazy cloud. Its stars are likewise scattered in an irregular form, and right next to it the dazzling globular cluster "47 Tucanae" — which belongs to our own galaxy — overlaps in the view, forming a beautiful pair.

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), together with the Large Magellanic Cloud, is a satellite galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, lying about 200,000 light-years away. It holds a special place in the history of astronomy: in the early 20th century, Henrietta Leavitt was studying the Cepheid variable stars within this very galaxy when she discovered the period–luminosity relation — that the longer a star's cycle of brightness variation, the brighter it truly is. Thanks to this law, humanity could measure the distance to a galaxy for the first time, opening the door to gauging just how vast the universe is.