Spectroscopic and Photometric Nearby Field Galaxy Survey
Poster paper presented at IAU Symposium 171, June 26-30 1995,
Heidelberg
SURVEY WHAT?; SAMPLE SELECTION
Because many galaxy properties like color, star formation rate and
emission line strength correlate with magnitude (e.g. Moody and
Kirshner 1988), our sample must span a broad range in absolute
magnitude. As a result, we want to avoid a purely magnitude or diameter
limited sample. We chose a mixed approach: we selected galaxies from
the first CFA redshift catalogue, which contains galaxies to a limiting
magnitude of m_B=14.5 (Huchra et al. 1983). We calculated the
absolute magnitude for each galaxy, and put galaxies in 1 magnitude
bins. We then drew galaxies from each bin so that the magnitude
distribution approximated the observed galaxy luminosity function.
Thus, of the 1006 galaxies that met our selection criteria, 196
galaxies remained.
Our sample containes galaxies with the desired range of absolute
magnitudes (-14 < M_B < -22), extending five magnitudes
fainter than the chararacteristic luminosity L* ~ -19.2 (de
Lapparent et al. 1989).