  The yellow supergiant content of nearby galaxies provides a critical test of
massive star evolutionary theory. While these stars are the brightest in a
galaxy, they are difficult to identify because a large number of foreground
Milky Way stars have similar colors and magnitudes. We previously conducted a
census of yellow supergiants within M31 and found that the evolutionary tracks
predict a yellow supergiant duration an order of magnitude longer than we
observed. Here we turn our attention to the SMC, where the metallicity is 10x
lower than that of M31, which is important as metallicity strongly affects
massive star evolution. The SMC's large radial velocity (~160 km/s) allows us
to separate members from foreground stars. Observations of ~500 candidates
yielded 176 near-certain SMC supergiants, 16 possible SMC supergiants, along
with 306 foreground stars and provide good relative numbers of yellow
supergiants down to 12Mo. Of the 176 near-certain SMC supergiants, the
kinematics predicted by the Besancon model of the Milky Way suggest a
foreground contamination of >4%. After placing the SMC supergiants on the H-R
diagram and comparing our results to the Geneva evolutionary tracks, we find
results similar to those of the M31 study: while the locations of the stars on
the H-R diagram match the locations of evolutionary tracks well, the models
over-predict the yellow supergiant lifetime by a factor of ten. Uncertainties
about the mass-loss rates on the main-sequence thus cannot be the primary
problem with the models.
