NGC 3726 is a bright, barred spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. It was discovered by William Herschel on February 5, 1788. According to Steve Gottlieb's NGC notes, Herschel positioned the galaxy at the north edge of the real position. According to the same notes, both Lord Rosse and R. Mitchell detected spiral arms in this galaxy.
There are many bright galaxies in the northern spring sky that show spiral structure, so why this one? Well, mostly because it took me by surprise when I first observed it. I was working my way through the H400 list and I usually don't look up beforehand what to expect as to not be biased. So I pointed my 20" telescope at it and, much to my surprise, saw a beautiful spiral galaxy. My notes from March 13, 2015, read
"At 320x this is a beautiful, spectacular galaxy! I see an oval nucleus inside an S-shaped object. There is a circle around the oval nucleus and the arms extend beyond that. Superb!"
I write "much to my surprise" because even with a 20" telescope I often find it hard to spot detail in bright galaxies. It very much depends not only on the galaxy itself but also the sky conditions what I can see. Apparently the combination of the galaxy and the sky that night made for a great observation. My notes don't say if I tried higher magnifications, so I will need to revisit it.
One other reason I chose this galaxy is that it is bright and I am curious to know what people with smaller telescopes make of it.
Finally, when I looked up this galaxy on Simbad, I found the description "galaxy in a group of galaxies" curious. It turns out that Crook et al conducted a statistical analysis of the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog and found statistical evidence for many groups of galaxies. The full article can be found here
Unfortunately it remains unclear to me what group NGC 3726 allegedly belongs to since part of Simbad is offline for maintenance. I'll update this text as soon as they're back online.
As always,
"Give it a go and let us know!
Good luck and great viewing!"
Last edited by wvreeven; April 3rd, 2017 at 08:51 AM.
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