The Large and Small Magellanic clouds are satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way galaxy.

This is the Small Magellanic Cloud:

There is a globular cluster at the image’s top edge – this is 47 Tucane, or NGC 104. There’s also another globular cluster at the image’s left edge called NGC 362 and it is part of the SMC. Although imaged in narrowband (SHO), the image is presented here using the HSS palette because the red color highlights the cloud’s structures and surrounding regions while keeping the star colors neutral.

This is the Large Magellanic Cloud:

The Tarantula Nebula with its embedded cluster of stars, NGC 2070, is at the 10 o’clock position. There are a lot of NGC objects in this image. The Magellanic clouds are named after the explorer Ferdinand Magellan whose crew discovered them during their first voyage around the world during 1519-1522. The Large Magellanic Cloud is expected to merge with our own Milky Way galaxy in about 2.4 billion years.

These images were captured using Telescope Live.