More commonly known as Hockey Stick Galaxy, NGC 4656 is a distorted edge-on spiral galaxy. Its distinctive shape is due to a recent gravitational interaction with the galaxy NGC 4631. It is not yet certain, but these two galaxies may be in the early stages of merging. The extremely faint object toward the bottom-left may not be part of the galaxy, but instead be a dwarf galaxy in the process of merging with NGC 4656.

This galaxy, along with the NGC 4632 (Whale Galaxy) is about 30 million light years away from us.

I took this image over 710 minutes in LRGB colors. Total of 22 images of Luminance (of 20 minutes) and 9 images each for R,G,B colors of 10 minutes each.