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Description
Galaxies are the most massive, luminous astronomical objects bound by self gravity and comprise the major fraction of luminous mass in the universe. Recent investigations of galaxies often require statistical analysis of a large body of observational data. High degree of homogeneity of the data is the key point to the success of such investigations. This catalog presents homogeneous photometric parameters of 791 northern bright galaxies on the basis of modern photographic surface photometry. Sample galaxies are taken from the Revised Shapley-Ames Catalog of Bright Galaxies (Sandage and Tammann 1981) and most of them are members of the Local Super-cluster. Observations were made with the 105cm Schmidt telescope at the Kiso Observatory, Institute of Astronomy, University of Tokyo, in the photographic V band (Kodak IIa-D emulsion combined with a Schott GG 495 filter) mostly during 1984-1988. Sample galaxies photographed on a total of 280 Schmidt plates were scanned with the PDS 2020 GMS microdensitometer at the Kiso Observatory during April-August 1988. Data reduction for standard surface photometry was carried out using a software library SPIRAL (Ichikawa et al. 1987; Okamura 1988) during July-September 1988. The intensive plate measurement and data reduction secure high homogeneity of the present data. This catalog is the first machine-readable version (Ver.1) of Part II (The Catalog) of the 'Photometric Atlas of Northern Bright Galaxies' (Kodaira et al. 1990), which also includes in Part III illustrative information such as images, isophotal maps, luminosity profiles, and ellipses fitted to the isophotes. Image data of sample galaxies can be obtained in FITS format magnetic tapes upon request, and it is planned to distribute them on CD-ROMs. We request that those errors in this catalog that are found by the user be transmitted to S. Ichikawa, National Astronomical Observatory, Mitaka, Tokyo 181 Japan (e-mail : richika@c1.mtk.nao.ac.jp) so that they can be corrected in future versions.
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