This image looks very noisy and with very small objects. That’s because this image is of a group of galaxies that’s about 300 million light years away. In comparison, Andromeda galaxy (our closest large galaxy) is just 2.5 million light years away. In other words, these galaxies are so far that the light that we are seeing now, left those galaxies 300 million years ago!

The NGC 3158 group is composed of 8 NGC galaxies and many others a bit over 300 million light-years distant by redshift.  NGC 3158 is a huge Elliptical galaxy whose gravity anchors the group. It has a size of 275,000 light-years for its outer reaches. 

NGC 3159 is listed as an E2 spiral and as peculiar.  That may be due to the very faint plume to the south. Ignoring the plume it is 67,000 light years across. 

NGC 3160 is a strange spiral likely involved in a collision to create its odd structure. It is about 83,000 light-years across. NGC 3151 at 60,000 light-years is a SA0 Galaxy. NGC 3152 is also rather odd being a ringed barred spiral with no arms, just the ring. NGC 3160 is a warped spiral seen edge on and is about 125,000 light-years wide. 

NGC 3161, an E2 galaxy, is the smallest of the NGC galaxies in the group at only 57,000 light-years but does have an active core indicating it is still reacting to a likely interaction with another galaxy not too long in the past. NGC 3163 is quite large at a bit over 140,000 light-years and listed as a SA0 galaxy rather than an elliptical.

NGC 3159, 3161 and 3163 appear to share a common halo indicating they may have had a close encounter with each other in the recent past. 

I am putting two images here. One without annotation and one with annotation.

I took this image over 15 hours. There were 32 Luminance images of 20 minutes each and each of the 3 colors were shot 9 times for 10 minutes each.