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Session 112 - Galaxy Surveys.
Oral session, Thursday, January 16
Harbour C,
Vital to most extragalactic astronomy is the ability to get outside our own galaxy. Galactic obscuration is a major systematic in studies of the cosmological distance ladder, large--scale structure surveys and modelling of distant supernovae. To date, the Burstein amp; Heiles (1978) extinction map has been the standard reference, however, with modern instrumentation it is now possible to move beyond this classic work.
In this talk, we will present an update and results of our work to photometrically calibrate a large automated photographic galaxy survey. This survey was specifically designed to investigate galactic extinction and will have accurate calibration of a large-area photographic survey (we have more than one CCD per plate). We will present detailed cross-correlations of the galaxy count data from this survey with the latest HI column density surveys. This immediately gives us a measure of the degree of extinction and how these two independent extinction indicators relate (i.e. variance in the dust-to-gas ratio). We will finish by discussing the continuation of this work to include new infrared/submillimeter data and discuss the relevence of this work to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
