A&A Supplement Ser., Vol. 124, July 1997, 163-182
Received 22 August, 1995; accepted 18 October, 1996
S. Arnouts 
-
V. de Lapparent 
-
G. Mathez 
-
A. Mazure 
-
Y. Mellier 
-
E. Bertin 
-
A. Kruszewski 
Send offprint request: S. Arnouts
CNRS, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris,
98 bis, Boulevard Arago,
F-75014 Paris,
France
European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, Santiago, Chile
Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de
Toulouse, URA 285, 14, avenue Edouard Belin, F-31400 Toulouse, France
Laboratoire d'Astronomie Spatiale, B.P. No. 8, F-13376 Marseille Cedex
12, France
Warsaw University Observatory, Al. Ujazdowskie 4, PL-00-478 Warsaw,
Poland
We present the photometric sample of a faint galaxy survey carried out in the
southern hemisphere, using CCD imaging at the 3.60 m and NTT-3.5 m telescopes
at La Silla (ESO). The survey area is a continuous strip of
located at high galactic latitude
(
) in the Sculptor constellation.
The photometric survey provides total magnitudes in the
bands B, V (Johnson) and R (Cousins) to limiting magnitudes of 24.5, 24.0, 23.5
respectively. To these limits, the catalog contains about 9500, 12150, 13000
galaxies in B, V, R bands respectively and is the first large digital
multi-colour photometric catalog at this depth.
This photometric survey also provides the entry catalog for a fully-sampled
redshift survey of 
700 galaxies with 
(Bellanger et al.
1995a).
In this paper, we describe the photometric observations and the
steps used in the data reduction. The analysis of objects and the star-galaxy
separation with a neural network are
performed using SExtractor, a new photometric software developed by
E. Bertin (1996).
By application of SExtractor to simulated frames and comparison of
multiple measurements, we estimate that the
photometric accuracy of our catalog is 
for 
.
Then, we use a method to obtain a homogeneous photometric scale over the whole
survey using the overlapping regions of neighbouring CCDs.
The differential galaxy number counts in B, V, R are in good agreement with
previously
published CCD studies and confirm the evidence for significant evolution at
faint magnitudes as compared to a standard non evolving model (by factors 3.6, 2.6,
2.1).
The galaxy colour distributions B-R, B-V of our sample show a blueing trend
of 
between 21 < R < 23.5 in contrast to the
V-R colour distribution where no significant evolution is observed.
keywords: galaxies: redshifts; photometry -- cosmology: observations