Magellanic Clouds

Two galaxies close to our own galaxy. They are irregularly shaped, and appear as detached parts of the Milky Way, in the southern hemisphere.

The Large Magellanic Cloud spreads over the constellations of Dorado and Mensa. The Small Magellanic Cloud is in Tucana. The Large Magellanic Cloud is about 169,000 light years from Earth, and about a third the diameter of our Galaxy; the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 180,000 light years away, is about a fifth the diameter of our Galaxy. They are named after the early-16th-century Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, who first described them.

Being co close, the Clouds are especially useful for studying stellar populations and objects such as supergiant stars. It was in the Small Magellanic Cloud that the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheid variables was first established by Henrietta Leavitt 1912.