It's especially astonishing to realize the NGC 602 complex is just one of many such objects embedded in the Small Magellanic Cloud (actually, it's located on its outskirts), and the SMC is just a small satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. We're only looking at a little piece of it because of Hubble's extremely narrow field of view. The other galaxies visible through the semitransparent nebulosity are at immense distances by comparison, and no doubt have their own satellite galaxies and component open clusters and molecular clouds. The spectacular spiral in the background is probably comparable to our own Milky Way.

It's always been one of my life's ambitions to travel to the Southern hemisphere and see the Clouds for myself, perhaps with dark-adapted naked eyes, from a windy hilltop in Tahiti. Perhaps this explains why the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson asked to be buried there. On his headstone is the verse

UNDER the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.