Sometimes also known as the Siamese Twins galaxies (although that name is falling out of favor), these two make a fine pair about 60 million lightyears away in the constellation Virgo. They are, indeed, colliding and merging with each other, which we can tell by an elevated rate of star formation and distributions of hydrogen, but they're at an early stage of the process.
Galaxies are hard to image from the city. I wasn't sure anything good was going to come out of this very messy dataset. Pre-processing in the linear mode looked awful, but stretching it really came together, especially when I used GeneralizedHyperbolicStretch rather than my usual HistogramTransformation (you can find out more about the GSH add-on script here:
https://ghsastro.co.uk/).
I wish the data were less noisy so I could bring out more detail in the galaxies, but I think this image came out rather nicely in the end!
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