The Small Magellanic Cloud looks like a piece of the Milky Way for the naked eye. It orbits our Milky Way galaxy at about 210,000 light years distance, which makes it the third-nearest external galaxy known (after the LMC and the 1994 discovered Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy). The SMC is of irregular type. It may be a distorted barred disk, deformed by the tidal gravitational forces of Milky Way and LMC, but this is not sure. It contains several nebulae and star clusters which can be seen in photographs and through telescopes. Our small neighboring galaxy contains the same kinds of objects as our Milky Way, in particular open clusters, diffuse nebulae, supernova remnants, planetary nebulae, and one globular cluster, NGC 121. It was in the Small Magellanic Cloud where Miss Henrietta Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relation of Cepheid variables, which is since then the most reliable method available for determining large cosmic distances. (For further details see Small Magellanic Cloud.)