4 Concluding remarks

In the sky region covered by the SERC Equatorial survey, we have found 50 low and very low surface brightness objects. Most of them presumably are nearby dwarf galaxies. More than half of these objects were previously uncatalogued. The presented results increase the number of possible dwarf companions around the nearby giant galaxies NGC 3115 and NGC 4594.

This work completes the entire-sky search for nearby LSB dwarf galaxy candidates. A total of $\sim 600$ objects have been found, half of them for the first time. The HI observations of these objects carried out by W. Huchtmeier confirm that most of them are really dwarf galaxies located in the Local Supercluster.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the anonymous referee for comments/suggestions that helped to improve the paper. IDK and VEK are grateful to STScI for the support of this collaborative project through the Science Visitor Program. We are also grateful to Dr. Conrad Sturch who provided us with all the facilities necessary to accomplish this work. IDK, VEK, and EKG acknowledge partial support through an Henri Chrétien International Research Grant administered by the American Astronomical Society. EKG acknowledges support by NASA through grant HF-01108.01-98A from the Space Telescope Science Institute. In the present work we used photographic data obtained with the UK Schmidt Telescope. The UK Schmidt Telescope was operated by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, with funding from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council (later the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council), until 1988 June, and thereafter by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. This work has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166.