The aperture photometry catalogues published by Longo and de Vaucouleurs (1983, 1985, de Vaucouleurs & Longo 1988) gather photoelectric aperture photometry in U, B, V, R and I and are almost complete until 1985 in U, B and V, and 1988 in R and I. We completed these catalogues with more recently published aperture photometry (see references in Table 2) and we merged it with the catalogue used in Buta et al. (1995). We did not consider here the infrared bandpasses (J, H, K, ...) because the corresponding measurements are based on a different technology and because their availability is still restricted compared to the visible photometry. Beside the photoelectric aperture photometry, we used the aperture photometry given in the ESO-LV catalogue (we considered only the B-band) and we selected 2-dimensional CCD photometry from the literature. For the star-resolved dwarf spheroidal companions of the Galaxy, we used published star-count profiles.
We selected from the litterature the 2-dimensional CCD photometry after two criteria: (1) The published data are suited to our purpose (this excludes, in particular, the profiles for which the central part, saturated or presumably affected by the seeing, is not presented). (2) The data are available in electronic form from the authors or from CDS or in the form of printed tables, which we re-digitized (we did not use profiles published as graphics). Finally, our database does not pretend to be complete: digitizing all the published table would require a huge amount of work.
With a few exceptions (e.g. Djorgovski 1985) the authors of surface photometry do not give integrated magnitude within centered circular apertures but within ellipses of varying position angle and ellipticity. Hence, we used the ellipses parameters to re-construct images on which we simulated aperture photometry. The set of simulated aperture diameters was chosen to match the published sampling along the minor axis. When the information was given by the authors, we retained only the apertures of diameter larger than 3 times the FWHM seeing and with an internal error on the integrated magnitude smaller than 0.05. When the information could not be derived from the description provided by the authors, we statistically determined it from the distribution of the residuals from the fit (i.e. the residuals from the growth curves depart toward larger magnitude for apertures affected by the seeing, we retained only the aperture large enough for that effect beeing smaller than 0.05 mag in average).
Excluding from the sample the galaxies having only photometry from the ESO-LV, our database contains aperture photometry on a total of 7744 galaxies from 445 references. Photoelectric photometry is available for 6129 galaxies, and surface photometry for 2774 galaxies.
The galaxy identifiers were adopted by descending the hierarchy: (a) NGC name, (b) IC, (c) UGC or ESO, (d) PGC (Principal Galaxies Catalogue, Paturel et al. 1992), and (f) LEDA internal identifier (also acronymed PGC as adopted in SIMBAD). We made use of the LEDA database (operated at Observatoire de Lyon) and SIMBAD (operated by Observatoire de Strasbourg) for doing the cross-identification. Finally, 7472 galaxies could be folded into this hierarchy of identifiers. The remaining 272 objects (4%) are identified by their coordinates (identifier A) and could not be identified with any galaxy in LEDA, whether because the coordinates are not known with a sufficient precision (possibly leading to an ambiguous identification) or because the galaxy is absent from LEDA.
Table 1, available only in electronic form, presents the aperture catalogue.