The star of this weekly Hubble image is NGC 2814, an irregular galaxy about 85 million light-years from Earth. In this image taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the galaxy looks very isolated: Visually, it looks a bit like a loose stroke of bright paint against a dark background.
However, appearances can be deceiving. NGC 2814 actually has three nearby (astronomically speaking) galaxies: a side-on spiral galaxy called NGC 2820; an irregular galaxy called IC 2458; and a front-on stripe-free spiral galaxy called NGC 2805. These four galaxies together form a galaxy group, the Holmberg 124 galaxy. In some literature, these galaxies are called "late-type galaxy groups".
Clarifying galaxy classification
The "late type" types refer to spiral and irregular galaxies, while the "early type" refers to elliptical galaxies. This rather confusing terminology has caused a common misunderstanding in the astronomical community. It is still widely believed that Edwin Hubble mistakenly believed that elliptical galaxies were the evolutionary precursors of spiral and irregular galaxies, which is why elliptical galaxies are classified as "early type" and spiral and irregular galaxies are classified as "late type".
This misunderstanding is due to Hubble's "tuning fork" galaxy classification, which visually shows the order of galaxy types from elliptical to spiral, and can easily be interpreted as a kind of temporal evolution.
However, Hubble actually adopted the two star classification terms "early type" and "late type" from older astronomical terminology, which does not mean that elliptical galaxies are the evolutionary predecessors of spiral galaxies and irregular galaxies. In fact, he made it clear in his 1927 paper: "...[early and late]...the terms refer to position in a sequence, whereas the temporal connotation is in one's surroundings".
The fact that this misconception persists nearly a hundred years later, despite Hubble's own emphasis on the issue, perhaps provides an instructive example of why it is helpful to classify things in easy-to-understand terms from the beginning.