Journal
ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL
Volume 142, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-6256/142/1/31
Keywords
atmospheric effects; galaxies: photometry; methods: data analysis; techniques: image processing
Categories
Funding
- NASA [06-GALEX06-0030, NNX09AC85G, NNX09AC95G]
- Spitzer grant [G05-AR-50443]
- Google Research Award
- California Institute of Technology
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Participating Institutions
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Science Technology Office [NCC5-626]
- NASA [NNX09AC85G, 120355, NNX09AC95G, 120486] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
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We describe a procedure for background subtracting Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging that improves the resulting detection and photometry of large galaxies on the sky. Within each SDSS drift scan run, we mask out detected sources and then fit a smooth function to the variation of the sky background. This procedure has been applied to all SDSS-III Data Release 8 images, and the results are available as part of that data set. We have tested the effect of our background subtraction on the photometry of large galaxies by inserting fake galaxies into the raw pixels, reanalyzing the data, and measuring them after background subtraction. Our technique results in no size-dependent bias in galaxy fluxes up to half-light radii r(50) similar to 100 arcsec; in contrast, for galaxies of that size the standard SDSS photometric catalog underestimates fluxes by about 1.5 mag. Our results represent a substantial improvement over the standard SDSS catalog results and should form the basis of any analysis of nearby galaxies using the SDSS imaging data.
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