Stephan's Quintet and NGC 7331

Stephan's Quintet is the small group of five galaxies at the bottom right of the picture. The spiral galaxy to the left is merely in the line of sight. The other four galaxies are very close together and interacting.

NGC 7331 (the brightest galaxy in the picture) is a spiral galaxy of visual magnitude 9.5 and at a distance of 46 million light years. The galaxies in the top left of this picture (including NGC 7331) are often referred to as the Deer Lick Group. It is not a real galaxy group - the fainter galaxies are ten times more distant.
This galaxy is particularly interesting because it is so similar to our own galaxy. It has about the save size, a similar sized black hole at the centre and the spiral structure is also similar.

 Stephan's Quintet, as its name implies, is a group of five galaxies (NGC7317, 7318A, 7318B, 7319 and 7320)  300 million light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. This unusual system has often been used as proof that the redshift is not truly a distance indicator, which would completely overturn current cosmology, because although four of the galaxies have similar, large redshifts, the fifth (NGC7320), although apparently a member of the group, shows a much smaller redshift. Conventional theory states that the low-redshift galaxy is in a nearby group (the NGC7331 group) and by coincidence appears on the sky projected against a distant background group. Opponents point to debris and tails around the low-redshift galaxy, suggesting that it is interacting with the high-redshift systems, which would require that all five galaxies be at the same physical location in space.

This image was taken with a Canon 40D DSLR and Stellarview 102ED refractor @ f/5.6. 30 x 5 mins @ ISO 1600 images captured, aligned and stacked in Nebulosity. Digital Development in Images Plus and final processing in Photoshop....The Galaxies are so faint with the 102mm scope so a future imaging session with the Meade 12" scope would improve clarity.