<p><strong>Looking like mounds of sugar crystals scattered across a black tablecloth, this ultraviolet image, released June 3, showcases the multitude of stars that reside within one of the <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/12/milky-way/croswell-text">Milky Way</a>'s small companion <a href="http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/galaxies-article/">galaxies</a>.</strong></p><p><a href="http://heasarc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/">NASA's Swift satellite</a> has produced the most massive ultraviolet-light survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) ever attempted.</p><p>The image is the culmination of nearly two days of exposure and was stitched together from 656 individual snapshots spanning 7,000 light-years across. (Related: "<a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/07/110720-galaxies-stars-stealing-space-science/">Neighboring Galaxy Caught With Stolen Stars</a>.")</p><p>While to Southern Hemisphere sky-watchers this dwarf galaxy looks like a small, hazy patch, the Swift satellite revealed 250,000 individual ultraviolet sources within the SMC.</p><p>"With these mosaics, we can study how stars are born and evolve across each galaxy in a single view, something that's very difficult to accomplish for our own galaxy because of our location inside it," NASA's Stefan Immler said in a press statement.</p><p><em>—Andrew Fazekas</em></p>