Five examples of statistical merger sequences selected from the IllustrisTNG simulation. The exact merger time t_merger has been rounded to the nearest 0.1 Gyr. According to our default definition, pre-mergers are those with t_merger between –0.8 and –0.1 Gyr, ongoing mergers are between –0.1 and 0.1 Gyr, and post-mergers are between 0.1 and 0.3 Gyr. Galaxies that do not satisfy these conditions are defined as non-mergers. The cut-outs are 256 × 256 pixels, with a resolution of ∼0.03″ per pixel. The images were scaled using the aggressive arcsinh scaling and were then normalised.