The SSRS2 Sample

Extending our earlier work, we examine galaxies in the equatorial region, primarily in the declination range -17.5 deg <= Dec. <= 0 deg, over a large range of right ascension, covering the southern and northern Galactic caps. For this purpose, we have obtained CCD isophotal magnitudes in the B and R bands for 265 galaxies of different morphological types.

Using this larger sample we confirm our earlier claim that the m(SSRS2) magnitudes are very nearly the magnitude measured within the isophote mu_B = 26 mag/arcsec^2, with a dispersion of about 0.30 mag. The relative zero-point offset between our m(SSRS2) magnitudes and CCD photometry is -0.02 mag from all data we have obtained. However, we detect a variation of the zero-point across different regions of the sky of +/- 0.10 mag for regions at large angular separations.