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The Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038 and NGC 4039) as captured by the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch (5-meter) Hale Telescope.

The galaxies are located about 63 million light years away and are in the process of slowly merging. The nucleus of each galaxy is seen as the two bright, white areas of the image. The small white and reddish spots between them are regions of intense star formation that is taking place as the gas clouds within the galaxies collide.

This image was captured by Christopher Conselice and Kevin Bundy of the  California Institute of Technology in May, 2004. They used the Hale Telescope's Wide-field Infrared Camera (WIRC).

The image was recorded in three near-infrared wavelengths: "J" centered at 1.250 microns, "H" at 1.635 microns, and "Ks" at 2.150. The J image was mapped to blue, H to green and Ks to red to make this false color image.

WIRC operates at the prime focus (f/3.3) of the Hale Telescope and records a field of view that is 8.49 arc minutes on a side.  The camera was developed jointly by Caltech and Cornell University. It features a 2048-square Rockwell Hawaii-II NIR detector manufactured by Rockwell Scientific in Camarillo, California.

The research was based on observations obtained at the Hale Telescope, Palomar Observatory, as part of a collaborative agreement between the California Institute of Technology, its divisions Caltech Optical Observatories and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (operated for NASA), and Cornell University.

See also this image of the Antennae Galaxies with Supernova 2004gt. It was also taken in the near-infrared using the Hale Telescope. Image courtesy of the The Caltech Core-Collapse Program (CCCP).
  

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