Ground-based shot captures dazzling view of the Small Magellanic Cloud

A ground-based image taken from Cerro Pachón, Chile, captures the Small Magellanic Cloud—a dwarf galaxy containing hundreds of millions of stars about 200,000 light-years from Earth—with a wide-aperture telephoto lens in a four‑hour exposure; the result, taken by NOIRLab ambassador Petr Horálek, looks like a image from a space telescope but was photographed on the ground, highlighting the SMC’s visibility to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere.