Either of two irregular companion Milky Way Galaxy , named for Ferdinand Magellan , whose crew discovered them during the first voyage around the world.
They share a gaseous envelope and lie about 22k apart in the sky near the southern celestial pole (see {{link=celestial sphere">celestial sphere ). They are visible to the unaided eye in the Southern Hemisphere but cannot be seen from northern latitudes. The Large Magellanic Cloud is more than 150,000 light-years from Earth; the Small Magellanic Cloud is roughly 200,000 light-years away. They are excellent laboratories for the study of the formation and evolution of star s.