Beauty. Sheer, incredible, perfectly coincidentally-timed beauty. Behold:

Holy Haleakala! Click on it for access to a much, much more beautiful version. This small one does it no justice at all.

This newly released Hubble image shows the intertwined pair called Arp 87, two big galaxies undergoing a collision. Halton Arp is an astronomer who cataloged peculiar galaxies in the 1970s, and many of them have been found to be colliding, or at least interacting in some way. This pair consists of NGC 3808A, the big spiral on the right, and NGC 3808B, the odd cigar-shaped dude on the left (actually, it’s an edge-on spiral). They are about 300 million light years away in the constellation of Leo, for those keeping track at home. They are separated by about 100,000 light years. The other edge-on spiral is a background galaxy, apparently.