The Butterfly Galaxies
The galaxies NGC4567 and NGC4568 are colliding 60 million light-years away. This is really pushing the resolution limits here; we had good “seeing” last night meaning not a lot of turbulence to smear out the light reaching my telescope, and I carefully collimated and calibrated things prior to imaging last night. About as good as I can get with 8 inches of aperture!
Explore the wider-field image for LOTS of “faint fuzzies” in the background – these are all even more distant galaxies, most of which are unnamed. I might throw another night of data at this if I can to pull them out even more.
The annotated image labels the ones that do have a name. You’ll see the previous nickname of this pair of galaxies, the “Siamese Twins” galaxies – but that name was determined to be racially insensitive and officially retired by NASA in August of 2020.
