NGC 4038, NGC 4039: With Gravitational Tails (or is it Gravitational "Tales"?)

OTA: CDK 24
Camera: Moravian 6100Pro
Observatory: Heaven's Mirror
Date of Capture: 5/23 & 2/24
Date of Processing: 2/24

Exposures:
R: 17 x 900 sec
G:14  x  "
B: 18 x  "
L:  were available but not used (L's add little to nothing to image quality for modern imaging)
H: 14 x 900 sec
Total Exposure time: 15.75 hours
Image Width: 21.5 arc-minutes

Processing Tools:
1.    Commercial: PixInsight, Topaz
2.    Pixinsight Addons: NoiseXTerminator, BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator, GraXpert
3.    My Scripts: NB_Assistant, AC_Restar, Subframe Weighting Tool (Excel w/ J. Hunt), ColorTweaker

Target Description:
Two colliding galaxies. Like many stimulating encounters, this one has caused both galaxies to reach a state of star-burst excitement as molecular clouds experience density fluctuations due to changing gravity fields and cloud-cloud collisions. Both galaxies host numerous large, young globular clusters that apparently formed early during this collision, as giant molecular clouds collapse into a swarm of stars (Wikipedia).

The "antennae," more formally called "gravitational tails," form as the two galaxies approach one another. As they spiral toward merging, the sheer size of the galaxies means that their two closer star regions feel considerably more gravitational pull toward the collision than do each of their more separated star and cloud regions. Thus, the closer galactic stars and nebulae accelerate toward the collision more rapidly. At the same time, the galaxies' more separated regions experience less gravitational acceleration and lag behind to form these gravity tails.

In addition, the structures of the galaxies have been totally distorted, perhaps from well organized spiral galaxies, into a chaotic jumble. Very likely, when the merger is completed, there  will be a single elliptical galaxy.

Processing Description:
Although about 4 hours of luminance was provided, I elected not to use it. With modern CMOS cameras, no extra binning of RGB, and AI noise removal, their utility has become arcane.

The plethora of reddish stars and the general appearance of the initial color-calibrated image suggest that some clouds lie between us and this object (undoubtedly residing within our galaxy). I intentionally suppressed this signal, favoring a darker background for this subject.

Being a small object, much of the detail resides near the pixel level, imparting graininess to the galactic clouds and starfield as each pixel records a different abundance of stars and clouds. Some of this graininess was remediated using a "super-resolution" tool, which uses a smoothing interpolation scheme to double the pixel number along each axis. Of course, such interpolations can lead to interpretations of pixel values that are, perhaps, plausible but not strictly accurate…but this is intentional art. I leave the science to Hubble ST—we cannot compete!

Target Statistics:
Distance: 45M ly
Apparent Magnitude: 11.2
Absolute Magnitude: -19.5
Average Surface Magnitude: 26.7 (core region)
Pixel Span at Target: 2.5E14 km

Alex Woronow