Astron. Astrophys. 317, 43-53 (1997)

7. Summary and Conclusions

We have presented a new photometric survey of bright galaxies with and . Comparison with our own CCD galaxy standards, as well as others from the literature, allowed us to estimate systematic errors in the photometry to be  mag over the whole magnitude range of the survey. Our data reveal no evidence of strong galaxy evolution as had been reported by Maddox et al. ( 1990d ) with the APM survey, although the slope of our number counts is still somewhat higher than what is predicted by no-evolution models brightward . A comparison with the APM data and other arguments suggest that the APM catalog is affected by a large magnitude scale error, underestimating by about 0.4 mag the flux of galaxies with . This would then justify the choice of a "high" normalization of the field luminosity function (concerning as well as ) already used by several authors to improve the fit of models at (e.g. Metcalfe et al. 1991 , 1995a , Glazebrook et al. 1994 ).

But, given the difficulties inherent to photographic photometry, it would be good to confirm our analysis with linear detectors in order to conclude definitively. Forthcoming digital large scale surveys like the SDSS (e.g. Kent 1994 ) should provide this possibility.

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 1997

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