Finally, I have been wanting to image this for a long time but never had enough focal length to do it justice until now. NGC 4567 and NGC 4568, commonly known as the Siamese Twins and also the Butterfly Galaxies, are located approximately 70 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. To me the Butterfly makes the most sense if you feel it necessary to apply nicknames. These galaxies are in the early stages of colliding with each other so there is not much apparent disturbance between them yet. The galaxies are quite similar to each other but one interesting difference is the color, NGC 4568 appears slightly yellow and NGC 4567 appears slightly blue.
I left the field a bit larger than most images taken with similar equipment because I wanted to keep the yellowish galaxy NGC 4564 on the left and the fainter bluish galaxy IC 3578 on the right. Many other faint fuzzies are scattered throughout this image. Although I only stacked 173 subframes, I collected much more but weather conditions often deteriorate quite rapidly around these parts. Lastly, you may have noticed the collection dates vs. the publication, this is due to a combination of factors such as the extra end of the school year stuff, my own projects, family stuff, waiting for better weather, and my own slow processing speed.
Dates: 4-30, 5-17, 5-19, 5-21
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