Chosen by NASA as the APOD for November 20, 2019... honoured and happy! : -)

Data acquisition: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA
Data processing: Rudy Pohl
RGB image
Software: Pixinsight 1.8, Photoshop CS5
Note: Hubble is so amazing - the detail at full resolution is stunning!

Arp 273 is a pair of interacting galaxies, lying 300 million light years away in the constellation Andromeda. It was first described in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled by Halton Arp in 1966. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, is about five times more massive than the smaller galaxy. Wikipedia

This is the first Hubble image I've processed in a while now. I've been struck be the shear beauty and grace of these two interacting galaxies since I first saw the image last year, so yesterday I decided to do it.

The processing involves taking 3 greyscale images that were shot with different filters by Hubble, stretching them and assigning red, green and blue to them in different channels and then combining them together into a single RGB image. This is followed by standard processing in Photoshop for colour, contrast, sharpness, denoise, etc. I widened the background width and clone-stamped some objects to fill the empty space.