A couple of entwined galaxies proceeding with their mergence. The two tails appear to wrap all the way around the left side of the galaxies and connect back where that background spiral appears at the bottom of the image. They'd be off the left and bottom sides of the frame if you could see them, but the exposure wasn't quite long enough to capture such faint features.

This is part of a snapshot / gap filler program for Julianne Dalcanton involving the study of peculiar galaxies which HST had never observed before. Only one filter is available for each, so color must come from elsewhere. In this case, I used the PanSTARRS survey to quickly add some color. You can see that many of the fine details in the image are lacking distinctive colors due to the lower resolution of the color data.

All of the observations from this proposal are available immediately to the public, so it can be fun to poke around. In fact HST took this image only a few hours before I made this image, and less than 24 hours before I posted it here.

Here's a link to the proposal abstract: Establishing HST's Low Redshift Archive of Interacting Systems

Luminosity: ACS/WFC F606W Red: PanSTARRS z Green: PanSTARRS i Blue: PanSTARRS g