A Catalog of Detailed Visual Morphological Classifications for 14034 Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive visual classification catalog of over 14,000 SDSS galaxies, detailing morphological features to aid future research and automated classification calibration.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed visual classification system for SDSS galaxies, including features like bars, rings, and dust lanes, with systematic analysis of sample biases.

Findings

Catalog includes 14,034 galaxies with detailed morphological features.

Systematic biases and classification systematics are analyzed.

The catalog serves as a benchmark for future morphological studies.

Abstract

We present a catalog of detailed visual classifications for 14034 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 4 (DR4). Our sample includes nearly all spectroscopically-targeted galaxies in the redshift range 0.01<z<0.1 down to an apparent extinction-corrected limit of g<16 mag. In addition to T-Types we record the existence of bars, rings, lenses, tails, warps, dust lanes, arm flocculence and multiplicity. This sample defines a comprehensive local galaxy sample which we will use in future papers to study low redshift morphology. It will also prove useful for calibrating automated galaxy classification algorithms. In this paper we describe the classification methodology used, detail the systematics and biases of our sample and summarize the overall statistical properties of the sample, noting the most obvious trends that are relevant for general comparisons of our catalog with previously published work.