big, bright galaxies

Now that Blanton has made a full estimate of the sky level for every image taken in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, it has become time to re-make our images of very bright galaxies. I worked on that today. I provide an example below.

It has also become time to provide the world with images of low-redshift luminous red galaxies, where the default SDSS pipelines underestimate flux. This has been an embarrassing issue for SDSS, without a lot of sensible discussion. Any volunteers for re-measuring the fluxes, sizes, and other parameters of a few 104 galaxy images?


  1. ps. That image demonstrates two of the remaining issues with our galaxy images: satellite trails (the red line towards the upper right) and filter reflections (the fuzzy blue-purple glow above the galaxy). Any volunteers for these?

  2. Andrew and I actually have a thesis student doing exactly this...