A catalog of morphologically classified galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: North equatorial region

We present a catalog of morphologically classified bright galaxies in the north equatorial stripe (230 deg(2)) derived from the Third Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Morphological classification is performed by visual inspection of images in the g band. The catalog contains 2253 galaxies complete to a magnitude limit of r = 16 after Galactic extinction correction, selected from 2658 objects that are judged to be extended in the photometric catalog in the same magnitude limit. A total of 1866 galaxies in our catalog have spectroscopic information. A brief statistical analysis is presented for the frequency of morphological types and mean colors in the catalog. A visual inspection of the images reveals that the rate of interacting galaxies in the local universe is approximately 1.5% in the r <= 16 sample. A verification is made for the photometric catalog generated by the SDSS, especially as to its brightend completeness.