Our galaxy doesn’t travel through space alone. A spiral galaxy with a disk extending more than 100,000 light-years, it lies in a neighborhood called the Local Group, which includes more than 50 other galaxies. Some of the neighborhood’s low-mass galaxies orbit the galaxy as satellites.
The two satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, can be seen in the night sky only from the Southern Hemisphere — or from space. This image was taken by Don Pettit, NASA’s oldest active astronaut at 69. He arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Sept. 11 after launching from Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with two Russian astronauts.
They took this long-exposure image from a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked to the ISS. It was one of three related images published by NASA on X; two showed the Magellanic Clouds, and the other showed the Milky Way.
Called irregular satellite galaxies because of their distorted shapes, the Magellanic Clouds contain billions of stars each. Many incredible astronomical observations have been made there. Perhaps the most famous was in the Large Magellanic Cloud, where in 1987, astronomers spotted the last supernova to be seen with the naked eye.
Last month, astronomers revealed the first high-quality, zoomed-in photo of a star outside our galaxy. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the star, WOH G64, is 1,500 times wider than the sun and is on the verge of exploding into a violent supernova.
The Magellanic Clouds are most easily seen between December and April from the Southern Hemisphere.
On his fourth spaceflight, Pettit has been taking long-exposure photos and posting them on X, including a star trail, SpaceX Starlink satellites and Las Vegas at night, one of the brightest places on Earth.