Today we visit an often overlooked group 1° NW of Markab. The two brighter NGC objects were discovered by William Herschel in 1784, NGC 1747 by d'Arrest in 1864.
Main subject are the three NGC galaxies, which are listed and catalogued as Holmberg 802. Both nearby UGC galaxies also belongs to the group and are listed as WBL 695 (Catalog of Nearby Poor Clusters of Galaxies of White et al.). But that's not large enough, because our field also belongs to the NGC 7448 (0.5° west) group (9 members).
Coming back to our field, there is not many scientific stuff out there. The two most interesting paper are from Li and Seaquist [1994AJ....107.1953L] and Merkulova at al. [2012AstL...38..290M]. Li and Seaquist described a membership of all three NGC plus UGC 12313 on the basis of HI observations. Merkulova at al. observed gravitational interaction of NGC 7464 and NGC 7465 but don't find the suspected polar ring in NGC 7465.
The visibility of the group started with very small aperture. I could pick up NGC 7463 and NGC 7465 easily with a 4-inch binocular telescope under good but not perfect conditions. A 8-inch showed all three NGC galaxies, while the faintest NGC 7464 was steadily visible with averted vision under soso conditions. Of course with 27-inch the group burst into bloom. Beside the two ghostly edge-on UGC's, the peculiar morphology of NGC 7463 and NGC 7465 becomes visible. But now it's your turn to observe and hopefully reports some results.
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