The Small Magellanic Cloud isn't much to look at with the naked eye, even for visitors to the International Space Station. Former astronaut John Grunsfeld told reporters Tuesday about a stargazing experience he had on the station.

"At one point, I complained about a small greasy smudge on the window.... That was the Small Magellanic Cloud," Grunsfeld, who three days ago was appointed deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, said during a teleconference at the American Astronomical Society annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

But now, Spitzer Space Telescope's incredible infrared camera has transformed the little smudge into a beautiful space photo.

In the image above, old stars are blue, while young stars are lighting up the dust around them in green and red. The new images of this neighboring dwarf galaxy, which is located about 200,000 light-years away, are part of an effort to better understand the life cycle of galaxies through tracking stardust.

"We're tracing how a galaxy evolves through the dust," said Karl Gordon, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, who is leading the effort to study the formation of the Small Magellanic Cloud.

In the optical wavelengths, as Gordon noted, the cloud is just "this kind of faint cloud, but in the infrared all the pieces of the galaxy come out."

That's because infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light. It can pass through dusty parts of the universe without being scattered. The upshot is that infrared astronomy lets scientists see through regions that would be nearly opaque to our eyes.

"Observations in the infrared give us a view into the birthplace of stars, unveiling the dust-enshrouded locations where stars have just formed," Gordon said in a release.

*Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI. XXL 8.9 megabyte version.

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