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T. G. Brainerd, C.J. Law (Boston Univ.), J. Brauher (IPAC), S. G. Djorgovski, K. Banas (Caltech)
We present a preliminary measurement of the angular clustering of faint galaxies that were detected in known quasar fields. The data were acquired with the Low Resolution Imaging Spectrograph on the 10-m Keck-I telescope and the apparent magnitudes of the detected objects have been corrected for extinction. We characterize the clustering of the galaxies by the two-point correlation function, \omega(\theta), and use the minimum variance estimator proposed by Landy & Szalay to compute the correlation functions for the objects detected in each of the independent fields.
The data which have been analyzed so far have yielded measurements of \omega(\theta) for galaxies with limiting magnitudes of R = 24.5 (17 independent fields) and R = 25.0 (11 independent fields). The mean correlation functions obtained from these fields show the galaxies to be strongly clustered (though not at a level higher than that of objects of similar magnitude detected in random blank fields) and the correlation function is well-characterized by a power law of the from A\omega \theta-\delta. The best-fit value of the power law index, \delta, is of order 1, which is somewhat steeper than the fiducial expected value of \delta = 0.8.
In the near future we will add additional quasar fields to our determination of \omega(\theta) and will also investigate both higher-order correlation functions of the galaxies with themselves as well as the possible clustering of the galaxies with the quasars.
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