1:29 pm - April 9, 2026Greg Meyer, an astrophotographer, spent nearly twenty-one hours over several nights pointing at a faint smudge of light in the southern constellation Corvus somewhere in a dark field outside Rockwood, Texas, a small town west of the Hill Country where the night sky still runs dark and wide. Corvus would go unnoticed by the majority of people. It is not as well-known as the Southern Cross or Orion. However, two entire galaxies have been colliding in slow motion for about 600 million years, hidden 62 million light-years away from Meyer’s location with his Sky-Watcher Esprit 120 telescope.
His creation, which was made public in late March 2026, is one of those pictures that stops you in your tracks. Inside a churning veil of interstellar dust, there are two orange-yellow galactic cores that glow like embers. On either side, they have long, sweeping arms that extend into the darkness like the antennae of some massive insect frozen in midair.
Formally known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, the galaxies are colloquially referred to as the Antennae Galaxies because of their long tidal tails that extend in both directions away from the collision zone. The tails were created during the two spirals’ first gravitational encounter between 200 and 300 million years ago, and they can reach lengths that make comparisons to earthly scales seem pointless.
The Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038 & NGC 4039)
| Official Designation | NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 — interacting spiral galaxies |
| Distance From Earth | ~62 million light-years (19 Megaparsecs) |
| Constellation | Corvus (the Crow) — visible in southern spring sky |
| Collision Start | ~600 million years ago · tidal tails formed ~200–300 million years ago |
| New Photograph | Greg Meyer · Starfront Observatory, Rockwood, Texas · published March 28, 2026 |
| Observation Time | ~21 hours · Sky-Watcher Esprit 120 telescope (840mm focal length) |
| Star Formation Event | Billions of stars triggered · “super star clusters” created · 90% will disperse |
| Surviving Clusters Est. | ~100 most massive clusters will persist as globular clusters |
| Final Outcome | Will merge into a single elliptical galaxy — collision ongoing |
| Milky Way Parallel | Milky Way will collide with Andromeda in ~4–5 billion years in same fashion |
Each arm is not so much a characteristic of a galaxy as it is a galaxy that is being simultaneously disassembled and reassembled. The original stars are still present in the cores, which appear as those warm amber centers in any image. However, the area surrounding and in between them has changed completely, becoming a turbulent region of gas, dust, and the strongest star formation in the nearby universe.
Meyer told Space.com that it was precisely this backstory that drew him to the target. He verified that his telescope could reach the target, compared his apparatus to the work of other astrophotographers on Astrobin, and proceeded. Several astronomy filters were used to assemble the final product, which was then processed using Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and the specialized astrophotography program PixInsight. Many dedicated amateur and semi-professional astrophotographers use the same pipeline to extract faint signal from hours of collected photons. He acknowledges that his telescope’s 840mm focal length is a bit short for the majority of galaxies. However, the Antennae are unique: even at low magnification, their breadth and drama translate well, and the image’s depth from the 21-hour observation period makes the outer arms’ structures actually visible rather than merely suggested.
From a scientific perspective, what the picture depicts is an enormously large-scale manufacturing event. Billions of new stars have been born as a result of the collision, mostly in the area where the two galaxy discs overlap, according to NASA’s composite observations using Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer, which have mapped this collision zone in multiple wavelengths. Super star clusters, the most massive and dense of these stellar nurseries, appear as brilliant blue knots of light embedded in glowing pink hydrogen gas in Hubble’s sharp optical images. Ninety percent of them won’t make it.
These clusters will disperse and their constituent stars will be dispersed into what will eventually become the smooth background of a new merged galaxy as the galaxies merge and the gravitational dynamics settle. It is anticipated that about 100 of the most massive clusters will survive the process and transform into globular clusters, which resemble the ones that orbit our own Milky Way. These are old, closely spaced stellar communities that retain the memory of a violent past in their structure.
Images like this add a personal dimension that is difficult to ignore. As the closest major galaxy collision that is currently visible from Earth, the Antennae Galaxies provide scientists with a glimpse of what will happen to the Milky Way when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years. In a gravitational sense, that collision is already underway; the two galaxies are moving toward one another at a speed of about 110 km/s. When it actually happens, the night sky as seen from any remaining vantage point will resemble what Meyer captured in Rockwood. Nearby, two galactic cores were glowing. Outward-extending tidal arms. Where none had previously existed, new stars were blazing.
When astrophotography is done well, it feels different from scientific imagery because it is done by someone with good equipment, patience, and a dark sky in a rural part of Texas rather than by space telescopes with billion-dollar optics. more personable. more intimate. Meyer’s goal was not precisely to do science. It was “such a cool image of two galaxies, with an amazing backstory,” which is why he set out.” The human tendency to point at something lovely and focus on it long enough to comprehend it is a valuable instinct. This collision has been going on in the universe for 600 million years and will go on for hundreds of millions more. The picture only exists for a brief period of time. It’s worth looking at in part because of that contrast.
