AN OPTICAL CATALOG OF GALAXY CLUSTERS OBTAINED FROM AN ADAPTIVE MATCHED FILTER FINDER APPLIED TO SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY DATA RELEASE 6

We present a new cluster catalog extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 6 (SDSS DR6) using an adaptive matched filter (AMF) cluster finder. We identify 69,173 galaxy clusters in the redshift range 0.045 <= z < 0.78 in 8420 deg(2) of the sky. We provide angular position, redshift, richness, core, and virial radii estimates for these clusters, as well as an error analysis for each of these quantities. We also provide a catalog of more than 205,000 galaxies representing the three brightest galaxies in the r band which are possible brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) candidates. We show basic properties of the BCG candidates and study how their luminosity scales in redshift and cluster richness. We compare our catalog with the maxBCG and GMBCG catalogs, as well as with that of Wen et al. We match between 30% and 50% of clusters between catalogs over all overlapping redshift ranges. We find that the percentage of matches increases with the richness for all catalogs. We cross match the AMF catalog with available X-ray data in the same area of the sky and find 539 matches, 119 of which with temperature measurements. We present scaling relations between optical and X-ray properties and cluster center comparison. We find that both A(200) and R-200 correlate well with both L-X and T-X, with no significant difference in trend if we restrict the matches to flux-limited X-ray samples.