Surface Photometry of Nearby Field Galaxies: The Data

We have obtained integrated spectra and multi-filter photometry for a repre-sentative sample of ~200 nearby galaxies. These galaxies span the entire Hubblesequence in morphological type, as well as a wide range of luminosities (M_B =-14 to -22) and colors (B-R=0.4 to 1.8). Here we describe the sample selectioncriteria and the U, B, R surface photometry for these galaxies. The spectro-photometric results will be presented in a companion paper. Our goals for theproject include measuring the current star formation rates and metallicity ofthese galaxies, and elucidating their star formation histories, as a functionof luminosity and morphology. We thereby extend the work of Kennicutt (1992) tolower luminosity systems. We anticipate that our study will be useful as abenchmark for studies of galaxies at high redshift. We discuss the observing, data reduction and calibration techniques, and showthat our photometry agrees well with previous work in those cases where earlierdata are available. We present an atlas of images, radial surface brightnessprofiles and color profiles, as well as tables of derived parameters. The atlasand tables of measurements will be made available electronically. We study the correlations of galaxy properties determined from the galaxyimages. Our findings include: (1) colors determined within the effective radiuscorrelate better with morphological type than with M_B and (2) 50 per cent ofthe low luminosity galaxies are bluest in their centers.