Visitors will spend up to an hour observing the very vocal Magellanic penguins, which bellow and strut along the beach by the hundreds.

CNN: 5 stunning places to see penguins

In forests of native cypress and Magellanic and Antarctic beech, unseen as the ship slipped by, the diminutive and endangered huemul deer roamed, as well as rarely seen pumas.

BBC: Patagonia��s ice-carved waterways

For instance, in other as-yet-unpublished work, they say they have discovered that the Magellanic Clouds (there is a small one as well) jointly sport a tail of stars that dangles around the Milky Way.

ECONOMIST: The galactic gourmand

From there, visitors transfer to a boat for a short ride to Isla Martillo, a research station that monitors the 3, 000 pairs of Magellanic penguins and a small colony of gentoo penguins that nest here between September and April.

CNN: 5 stunning places to see penguins

Hong-Sheng Zhao of Leiden University in the Netherlands calculates that a close encounter with another one of the Milky Way's satellites, the Large Magellanic Cloud, could have knocked Sgr into a closer orbit two or three billion years ago.

ECONOMIST: The galactic gourmand