1 Introduction

This paper completes a series of publications devoted to photometry of the brightest stars in nearby late type galaxies having radial velocities V₀ < 500 km s^-1 from the sample by Kraan-Korteweg & Tammann (1979) with the aim to measure their distances regardless of velocities. Distance moduli derived via the luminosity of blue and red supergiants (Sandage & Tammann 1974; de Vaucouleurs 1979) have a typical error of $0\hbox{$.\!\!^{\rm m}$ }4-0\hbox{$.\!\!^{\rm m}$ }5$, which exceeds the mean error of $0\hbox{$.\!\!^{\rm m}$ }1-0\hbox{$.\!\!^{\rm m}$ }2$moduli derived from the luminosity of cepheids or the tip of red giant branch. However when applied to the dwarf galaxies consisting of about 90% of the Local Volume population, the method of the brightest stars gives a 2-3 times better accuracy than the widespread method of Tully-Fisher (1977). The initial sample of 179 galaxies in the Local Volume with V₀ < 500 km s^-1 (Kraan-Korteweg & Tammann 1979) was increased by Karachentsev (1994) to as many as 216 galaxies. Among them almost all 120 northern galaxies were imaged with a CCD at the 6-m SAO telescope and the 2.5-m Nordic telescope in La Palma (Karachentsev et al. 1994; Georgiev et al. 1997; Makarova et al. 1997; Karachentsev et al. 1997; Makarova & Karachentsev 1998; Karachentsev & Drozdovsky 1998; Tikhonov & Karachentsev 1998). Besides several early type objects (NGC 404, NGC 4150, NGC 4736, NGC 4826, and Maffei 1) all of the galaxies are resolved into stars, moreover most of them for the first time.

Here we present large-scale images of three previously unobserved galaxies: NGC 784, NGC 2683, NGC 2903, as well as of three galaxies, NGC 5204, NGC 5474, and NGC 5585, from the M 101 group imaged with a higher angular resolution.