The Edinburgh/Durham Southern Galaxy Catalogue - IX. The Galaxy Catalogue

TL;DR

The paper announces the public release of the Edinburgh/Durham Southern Galaxy Catalogue, a large, digitized galaxy survey covering over 1182 square degrees with nearly 1.5 million galaxies, enabling large-scale structure studies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed description of the catalogue's design, construction, and validation, making it a valuable resource for galaxy distribution research.

Findings

Catalogue contains 1,495,877 galaxies with 27 image parameters.

Photometric accuracy of approximately 0.1 magnitudes.

Star-galaxy separation accuracy is consistent with visual checks.

Abstract

We announce here the public availability of the Edinburgh/Durham Southern Galaxy Catalogue (EDSGC, http://www.edsgc.org). This objective galaxy catalogue was constructed using the COSMOS micro-densitometer at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh and constitutes one of the largest digitized galaxy surveys currently in existence. The EDSGC contains a total of 1,495,877 galaxies (each with 27 image parameters) covering an contiguous area of 1182 sq deg centered on the South Galactic Pole. The data consists of photographic bj magnitudes calibrated via CCD sequences which provide a plate-to-plate accuracy of bj~0.1. Extensive external checks have demonstrated that the global EDSGC photometry is free of large-scale systematic gradients and is therefore, ideal for studying the distribution of galaxies on large angular scales. Independent spectroscopy of EDSGC galaxies has shown that the accuracy of the star-galaxy separation is consistent with earlier visual checks and that only 12% of EDSGC galaxies are potentially mis-classified. This paper is intended to provide a summary of the essential details of the catalogue's design and construction as well as provide a brief summary of the main scientific achievements using the EDSGC over the last ten years.