Higher Order Moments of the Angular Distribution of Galaxies from Early Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data

We present initial results for counts in cells statistics of the angulardistribution of galaxies in early data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey(SDSS). We analyze a rectangular stripe $2.5^\circ$ wide, coveringapproximately 160 sq. degrees, containing over $10^6$ galaxies in the apparentmagnitude range $18 < r^\prime < 22$, with areas of bad seeing, contaminationfrom bright stars, ghosts, and high galactic extinction masked out. This surveyregion, which forms part of the SDSS Early Data Release, is the same as thatfor which two-point angular clustering statistics have recently been computed.The third and fourth moments of the cell counts, $s_3$ (skewness) and $s_4$(kurtosis), constitute the most accurate measurements to date of thesequantities (for $r^\prime < 21$) over angular scales $0.015^\circ-0.3^\circ$.They display the approximate hierarchical scaling expected from non-linearstructure formation models and are in reasonable agreement with the predictionsof $\Lambda$-dominated cold dark matter models with galaxy biasing thatsuppresses higher order correlations at small scales. The results are ingeneral consistent with previous measurements in the APM, EDSGC, and Deeprangesurveys. These results suggest that the SDSS imaging data are free ofsystematics to a high degree and will therefore enable determination of theskewness and kurtosis to 1% and less then 10%, as predicted by Colombi,Szapudi, & Szalay (1998).Comment: 24 pages, submitted to Ap