Explanation: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth.
As a result, two celestial wonders easily visible for southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the Clouds of Magellan.
The Small Magellanic Cloud pictured above actually spans 15,000 light-years or so and contains several hundred million stars.
About 210,000 light-years distant in the constellation Tucana, it is the fourth closest of the Milky Way's known satellite galaxies, after the Canis Major
