A telescope was aimed at a region of the constellation Corvus for almost twenty-one hours in a row, somewhere in the dark skies above Rockwood, Texas, gathering light that had been passing through the cosmos for sixty-two million years. Greg Meyer, an astrophotographer, wasn’t pursuing a deadline or breaking news. He was pursuing something much older than either: a collision between two galaxies that would be so violent and slow that it would make any human dispute seem insignificant.
The final picture is one of those that merits a quiet moment. The two galaxies, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, have orange-yellow cores that glow in the middle of the frame like embers in a fire that burned long before humans existed. The tidal tails that give these galaxies their collective name, the Antennae Galaxies, are long, arching arms of displaced stars and gas that extend outward from either side into the surrounding darkness. The insect analogy is clear and a little unnerving when you look at them; it’s like seeing something that wasn’t supposed to look biological.
| Subject | The Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038 & NGC 4039) |
|---|---|
| Location in Sky | Constellation Corvus (The Crow) |
| Distance from Earth | Approximately 62 million light-years |
| Current Status | Merging In process of forming a single elliptical galaxy |
| Merger Duration | Hundreds of millions of years (ongoing) |
| Notable Feature | Elongated “tidal tails” resembling insect antennae; triggered mass starburst event |
| Photographer | Greg Meyer (amateur astrophotographer) |
| Observatory Location | Starfront Observatory, Rockwood, Texas, USA |
| Telescope Used | Sky-Watcher Esprit 120 (840mm focal length) |
| Camera Used | ZWO ASI533MC Pro |
| Total Observation Time | Just under 21 hours |
| Editing Software | Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, PixInsight |
| Previous Hubble Images | 1997 (WFPC2), 2006 (ACS), 2013 (WFC3 + ACS — best to date) |
| Reference / Further Reading | NASA Hubble — Antennae Galaxies |
Meyer admitted that the 840mm focal length of the Sky-Watcher Esprit 120 telescope he was using was “a little short for most galaxies.” That kind of candor is genuinely endearing. Before making the attempt, he checked the astronomy platform Astrobin to see if anyone else had achieved a similar shot using the same apparatus.
The choice was made after he verified it was feasible. After hours of light data collection, PixInsight, Adobe Photoshop, and Lightroom were used to assemble and refine the data. This was done by someone who wasn’t doing it for profit but rather because the history of these specific galaxies was too fascinating to ignore.
“Two galaxies colliding” doesn’t fully convey the scope of what’s occurring, so it’s important to consider what this picture actually depicts. In the past, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 were thought to be sedate spiral galaxies, similar to our own Milky Way. Their mutual gravitational pull has been gradually destroying both of them for several hundred million years, tearing stars from their host systems to create streaming arcs that are visible between the two cores.
Astronomers refer to the chaos as a “starburst event,” a time when galaxies are rapidly burning through their gas reserves to create new stars. In the tidal arms, super star clusters—massive concentrations of recently formed stars—have developed. As the merger proceeds, the majority of them will probably disperse, but some might endure as globular clusters.
Sitting with these facts makes it difficult to avoid feeling a little lightheaded. When the last non-avian dinosaurs were still roaming the planet 62 million years ago, the violence shown in Meyer’s photo took place. The light that was captured during those twenty-one hours above Rockwood, Texas, departed those galaxies just as an asteroid was bringing an end to one chapter of life on Earth. In the Hill Country of Texas, we are essentially viewing ancient history through a consumer-grade telescope.
The Antennae Galaxies were visited by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope three times, in 1997, 2006, and most definitively in 2013. By combining data from two of Hubble’s cameras, the telescope created what is still the best institutional image of the pair. Thanks to the telescope’s well-known servicing missions, each Hubble image was sharper than the last.
In contrast to the brilliant blue flash of recently ignited stellar nurseries and the dark filaments of dust, the 2013 version displayed bright pink blotches of ionized hydrogen designating active star-forming regions. Clearly, Hubble’s version has the higher resolution. However, there is something about Meyer’s ground-based photo that carries its own weight, perhaps the intimacy of it or the awareness of the hours spent from a single location under Texas skies.
It is anticipated that the Antennae Galaxies will eventually merge completely into one massive elliptical galaxy. The supermassive black holes that are currently at the center of each galaxy will eventually locate one another, spiral inward, and merge, releasing a burst of gravitational waves in the process. Reckoning is still about 400 million years away, according to researchers. Knowing that something this dramatic can still be patient gives that timeline a peculiar sense of comfort.
In the northern hemisphere, this is galaxy season, when deep space targets in Virgo, Corvus, and the surrounding constellations rise high enough in the evening sky to reward Meyer’s kind of focused attention. As equipment continues to advance, processing software continues to become more sophisticated, and the number of serious amateur astrophotographers continues to grow, it’s possible that more images of similar quality will surface from remote locations and backyard observatories in the coming weeks.
However, the Antennae Galaxies, two worlds in a death spiral that have managed to produce some of the most spectacular star births in the observable universe, have a way of making you feel as though no amount of future imagery will be able to make this one seem ordinary.