The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, our own galaxy. Its actually pretty large, about 70x of the Moon's size although quite dim and requires dark skies to be seen by the naked eye. Hovering close by is 47 Tucanae, a globular cluster which some claim to be more spectacular than Omega Centauri.
This image was taken in Rockhampton, Australia. I originally planned to shoot the Magellanic Clouds in a Bortle 3 site at Cawarral. When reaching there, the conditions were perfect with the Milky Way shining brightly overhead and..... clouds rolled in while I was setting up
. After waiting for 30 mins or so without improvements to the weather, the group decided to head back. And guess what? It was clear there, so I just went for it and imaged at the hotel under Bortle 5 conditions.
Some cropping was done to get a closer view on the SMC. To complement this, I made an exact crop version on my other image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)
https://www.astrobin.com/ey18bw/ to show their relative sizes.
Shot at 70mm F2.8 @ ISO1600 using a static tripod following the NPF rule.
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