In this paper, we have presented a catalogue of both photoelectric and surface photometry concerning 7744 galaxies. We explored different sets of growth curves to fit these data, and finally adopted interpolations between the de Vaucouleurs (r1/4) and exponential laws. We then derived the photometric parameters for 5169 galaxies, twice the RC3 sample.
While the use of growth curve fitting ignores the details of the structure of galaxies: dust, arms, active nuclei... it is still the most effective method to derive homogeneously photometric parameters. The total magnitude, effective aperture and photometric type hence determined, provide a realistic basic description of the galaxies. Going further requires accurate 2-D photometric analysis (Prugniel & D'Onofrio 1997; Héraudeau & Simien, in preparation).
The data presented in this paper may also be conveniently consulted
via Hypercat to:
(http://www-obs.univ-lyon1.fr/
prugniel/cgi-bin/hypercat/).
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to R. Buta as a referee for his helpful comments on the manuscript and for sending us the revUBV catalogue. We thank D. Burstein, I. Jørgensen, G. Longo, J. Lucey, R. Peletier and P. Poulain who sent their published data in computer readable form, and C. Petit and F. Simien who helped to digitize some tables. We have made use of the Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database (LEDA) supplied by the LEDA team at the CRAL-Observatoire de Lyon (France) and of SIMBAD (Observatoire de Strasbourg, France