A look at a brilliant fireworks show at the center of a collision between two galaxies.

HST uncovered over 1,000 bright, young star clusters bursting to life as a result of the head-on wreck. The respective cores of the twin Antennae galaxies are the orange blobs crisscrossed by filaments of dark dust. A wide band of chaotic dust, called the overlap region, stretches between the cores of the two galaxies. The sweeping spiral-like patterns, traced by bright blue star clusters, shows the result of a firestorm of star birth activity which was triggered by the collision. Antennae galaxies were so named because a pair of long tails of luminous matter, formed by the gravitational tidal forces of their encounter, resembles an insect's antennae. The galaxies are located 63 million light-years away in the southern constellation Corvus.