The four largest galaxies in this image are known collectively as Hickson 44, one of 100 entries in Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson's Catalogue of Compact Galaxy Groups, which was published in 1982. I framed the shot to try to create an illusion of movement of the four, as if they were flying in formation diagonally across the field. They really are moving as a group, thanks to their mutual gravitational interactions, but their collective motion is away from us, owing to the cosmic expansion. At a distance of about 80 million light years, their recessional speed is about 1300 km/sec, roughly 0.4% of the speed of light. 

All four galaxies are also in the New General Catalogue: from left to right they are the spiral NGC 3185, the nearly edge-on and strongly-warped spiral NGC 3190, the S-shaped spiral NGC 3187, and the elliptical NGC 3193. Three of them (excluding NGC 3185) also form Arp 316, from Halton Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.

Tidal interactions between the galaxies are creating the obvious distortions in the shapes of NGC 3190 and 3187, and contributing to the vigorous star formation evident in NGC 3187, and possibly to a lesser extent in NGC 3185. The group's evolving formation is expected to result in one or more mergers, which will take place on cosmic timescales of hundreds of millions of years. Many far more distant galaxies are also sprinkled throughout the field.

Interestingly, the warped spiral also has the designation NGC 3189, which references the south-western side of the galaxy (left-bottom direction in the orientation of this frame), where the brightest part of the galaxy below the dust lane is located.

The image is the result of about 16 hours of integration, split roughly equally between luminance and RGB colour, and was acquired over 10 nights in January and February. Seeing conditions were generally average on most of those nights, so the image resolution is not as fine as I had hoped. Consequently I downsampled from the native resolution of the CDK24/FLI KL4040 telescope/camera combination by 75%, with a resulting plate scale of about 0.62"/pixel. The field-of-view of this crop is about 27' by 22'.