A giant space pumpkin? Hubble snaps this creepy-looking galaxy pair 120 million light-years away

This throwback Hubble image features a pumpkin-like galaxy pair - catalogued as NGC 2292 and NGC 2293 - that lies 120 million light-years away in the constellation Canis Major. An arm of newly forming stars embracing the interacting galaxy pair gives the imaginary pumpkin a wry smirk.

"What looks like two glowing eyes and a crooked carved smile in this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope snapshot is the early stages of a collision between two galaxies," NASA wrote on its website. The image was originally released by the agency in 2020.

The entire view is nearly 109,000 light-years across, approximately the diameter of our Milky Way. The overall pumpkin-ish color corresponds to the glow of aging red stars in the galaxy duo and the glowing eyes are concentrations of stars around a pair of supermassive black holes.

What do you see? Perhaps snuggling cats, figures in a sand storm, or a pair of eyes!Hubble captured a pair of interacting galaxies that spans 100,000 light-years. The glowing “eyes” are concentrations of stars around supermassive black holes.Details: https://t.co/agBCu5WLyv pic.twitter.com/mdTL1akYvh

— Hubble Space Telescope (@HubbleTelescope) July 29, 2022

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The space-based observatory has made more than 1.5 million observations of about 50,000 celestial objects in its 32+ years of operation and more than 19,000 scientific papers have been published by astronomers using Hubble data.