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P. W. Hodge (U. Wash.)
"Redshifts and Magnitudes of Extragalactic Nebulae", M. L. Humason, N. U. Mayall and A. R. Sandage, ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL, 61, 97-162, 1956. The HMS Catalog, as it was popularly called, was much more than this nickname suggests. It was at once a spectacular assemblage of redshift data, a fitting memorial to Hubble, an inspiring example of collaboration by competing observatories, a careful treatment of tricky photometric data, a pioneering attempt to apply general relativity to the new data and a major revision in the extragalactic distance scale. Two of the authors were established masters at obtaining spectra of almost impossibly faint objects (for those times) and this paper was for them the culmination of both a 20-year collaborative program and, to some extent, their research careers. The third author was a recent PhD who had worked with Hubble as a student and for whom this paper was more of a beginning than a culmination. Together they filled virtually an entire issue of the ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL. The paper was a landmark in extragalactic astronomy and a distinguished precedent for the many more recent observational surveys of the universe of galaxies.