I always wanted to make an image of Stephan's Quintet (I used to work with a man called Stephan), but it's a bit small for my image scale. Then I realised I could combine it with an image of the Deer Lick group, so that's what i did !

This image shows two groups of galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. In the upper left part is the "Deer Lick" group, with the prominent spiral galaxy NGC 7331 in the foreground. At the lower right is group called Stephan's Quintet. 

The Deer Lick group was named after the Deer Lick Gap in the North Carolina mountains, after amateur Tom Lorenzin had a particularly good view of it from there. NGC 7331 is the most prominent member of the group but is much closer at about 40 million light years. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1784. The four other galaxies which make up the group are almost ten times further away, at distances from 294 to 365 million light years. This spread of distances means that they are not a real galaxy group. These four are sometimes referred to as the "fleas". NGC 7331 is similar in size to our Milky Way galaxy but has some odd features: its central bulge appears not to be fully centred in the disk, and it rotates in the opposite direction to the rest of the disk.

Stephan's Quintet is named after Édouard Stephan who discovered the group in 1877 from the Marseilles Observatory, almost a hundred years after Herschel's discovery of NGC 7331. This was the first compact galaxy group discovered, though one of them (NGC 7320) is about 40 million light years from the others and not a true member of the group. The other four are interacting gravitationally, as can be deduced from their odd shapes, and are about 210 – 340 million light years away.