In this section we study the influence of selection effects on the distribution of clusters and superclusters, and on the space density of clusters.
The probability to detect a cluster at a certain location depends
on the galactic obscuration and on the distance of the cluster. To
investigate the selection effects we determined the volume density
of clusters of galaxies in bins of spherical shells of thickness of
20 h
Mpc and
in bins of 
(b is the galactic latitude). Results are
shown in Fig. 3 (click here), separately for all clusters and for the
population of clusters in very rich superclusters with at least 8
members. The distributions are given for all clusters, but the selection
effects are similar for only the clusters with measured redshifts
(Einasto et al. 1997b).
This figure shows that the dependence of the space density of
clusters on distance and on 
is almost linear. Thus we can
represent the selection effects by linear laws: 
, and 
, where
, 
, 
, and 
are constants, and 
is the limiting radius of the sample. Both for all clusters
and for those in very rich superclusters, corrected for
incompleteness and Galactic extinction, we find: 
,
. The latitude dependence is given by the value
, at which the density is equal to zero. For
samples of all clusters and clusters in very rich superclusters we
get 
, and 
, respectively.
These data were used also to derive the mean number density of
clusters in space. In order to be left with 1304 clusters in the
volume under investigation and with the above selection function,
we actually need approximately 9000 clusters in a cube of side
700 h
Mpc. Thus the mean density of Abell-ACO clusters in space,
corrected for incompleteness and Galactic extinction, is 26 per
cube of side-length 100 h
Mpc, or 
, or approximately twice the estimate by Bahcall & Cen
(1993). This estimate of the space density of clusters is
consistent with the results by Postman et al. (1996) obtained from
the study of distant clusters.
This calculation shows that selection effects are important in deriving the density of clusters in space. The comparison with random supercluster catalogues also shows that in low galactic latitudes the multiplicity of superclusters is distorted as some supercluster members are not visible. This explains the observed fact that the density of rich and very rich superclusters decreases toward galactic equator more rapidly than the density of poor superclusters, see Fig. 3 (click here).