KAIT automatically detected this candidate during the night of April 14, 1997. It re-scheduled a confirmation image about 90 minutes later, which also shows the candidate. The next day, Chien Peng, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, noticed the candidate during his scan of the KAIT data and alerted the Berkeley team. The picture above shows five local comparison stars, marked with letters. On April 16 UT, Alex Filippenko, Aaron Barth and A. M. Gilbert acquired a spectrum of the object with the Lick 3-m Shane reflector.
Balmer emission lines on a featureless continuum.
There are also many weaker Fe II emission lines. NGC 3627 is a galaxy about which we know quite a bit. NGC 3627 belongs to the Leo group of galaxies. There are several measurements of the distance to this group. Wells et al.