An image of the Antennae Galaxies by Madhup Rathi. These galaxies are some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus. The two large galaxies are colliding, leaving a long tail of their remnant spiral arms. Spanning about 500 thousand light-years, the stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide directly in the course of this merger, but their large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage.
Madhup captured this image over 11.5 hours. (13 luminance images of 30 minutes each and 15 color images (5 each of RGB) of 20 minutes each.