The famous double galaxy of Ursa Maior is an easy target with any kind of telescope. The brighter M81 spiralgalaxy can be detected even in the finderscope. Its smaller and fainter companion, the irregular M82 is interesting especially when looking at larger magnification levels, with several clearly detectable dense areas. Looks best when having a FoV of at least 1°, as in that case both of the galaxies can be fit into one picture. The nearby NGC 3077 is also worth a look, although it's even smaller and fainter than the M82.

This triplet of galaxies always make me smile: I'm calling it a "dumb face" cluster. The M65-66 double is a classic, easy Messier-object: both can be well seen - perhaps the latter having a brighter, almost star-like core region. It's not clear for me why the NGC 3628 was left out of Messier's catalogue: it's not at all a difficult object either. Its brightness is quite close to that of M65 and while wandering around looking for its more famous companions, you may most probably bump into this one also.

Shiny, elongated galaxy near the famous Owl-nebula. Its core looks almost like a star, I estimate a brightness of around 12m. More dense parts are visible, the most notable is the very shiny area towards the Western end of the galaxy.

The M97, also known as the Owl-nebula is a very spectacular, famous planetary, in the vicinity of M108. It's a nearly regular circle, slightly elongated in E-W directions. Also on the Eastern and Western corner one can find two darker spots, the eyes of the owl. The planetary itself is quite an easy object, looks much brighter than the 11m as listed in catalogues, a homogenous shape with sharply fading edges. Discovering the eyes is a bit harder: especially the Western spot is tend to blink. Using your averted vision helps a lot to see the details. I was using my Baader UHC filter to finish this sketch, however according to my experiences a slightly better seeing helps much more than the filter.

An interesting and very spectacular trio of galaxies in the constellation Leo. NGC 3222: the westernmost member is a really faint slightly elongated galaxy of about 13 magnitudes only. Its core is like a star, with quickly increasing luminosity. To the SW of this I can detect a faint little star in front of the galaxy. NGC 3226 and 3227: spectacular, closely interacting couple, no wonder it was included in Halton Arp's famous catalogue of peculiar galaxies with the number 94. Among them the latter is much brighter and larger with a star-like core which brightens quickly. The 3226 is the opposite of this with a really homogeneous surface and almost no visible core.

Faint but star-like core with a magnitude of about 13.5. The galaxy itself is faint, does not show any structures. This may be because of the terrible atmospheric conditions, as on astrophotographs it shows arms that seem quite an easy catch. These arms can only be suspected because of the slightly elongated ellipse shape, as the galaxy is in fact almost perfectly face-on - this means that the ellipse shape is formed because of the two arms in the N-S directions. An interesting feature is a bright foreground star.

The galaxy is also in Arp's catalogue with number 206 has an interesting bent shape thanks to the nearby interactive galaxy of PGC 32617. Its brightness is defined between 11 and 13.6m according to various sources, I estimate it somewhere closer to 10 magnitudes. Three foreground stars make the view more spectacular.

A very spectacular interacting couple in an environment sparsely populated by field stars. NGC 3718 is much larger, a perfectly face-on spiral galaxy, that is also catalogued by Arp with number 214. It feels as if it has a much larger area than what can be detected by direct vision. To the East of the galactic core I notice a brighter arc, however apart from this little detail and the little bit brighter core it has a really homogeneous look. The smaller NGC 3729 shows the typical core area of an edge-on galaxy, however according to astrophotos, what I see is a bit tricky, and the galaxy itself is far from being edge-on.