Color Gradients in Spiral Galaxies

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Session 77 -- Spirals II
Display presentation, Wednesday, 11, 1995, 9:20am - 6:30pm

[77.15] Color Gradients in Spiral Galaxies

S.Courteau (NOAO), J.Holtzman (Lowell)

We present first results from a subset of a multicolor imaging survey of $\sim$350 late-type spiral galaxies. BVRH images are extracted for 50 galaxies. We examine specifically the effect of sky subtraction errors on color gradients and discuss the variation of profile scalelengths with color. We show that B-H color gradients can be as large as 2 magnitudes. In the outer regions, colors are roughly independent of inclination which suggests that disks are optically thin near the Holmberg radius at all wavelengths. We show that dust appears to be a likely explanation for Freeman Type II disks and Freeman's law of constant disk central surface brightness at B.

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