New York University Value-Added Galaxy Catalog: A Galaxy Catalog Based on New Public Surveys

Here we present the New York University Value-Added Galaxy Catalog(NYU-VAGC), a catalog of local galaxies (mostly below a redshift of about 0.3)based on a set of publicly-released surveys (including the 2dFGRS, 2MASS, PSCz,FIRST, and RC3) matched to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 2.Excluding areas masked by bright stars, the photometric sample covers 3514square degrees and the spectroscopic sample covers 2627 square degrees (withabout 85% completeness). Earlier, proprietary versions of this catalog haveformed the basis of many SDSS investigations of the power spectrum, correlationfunction, and luminosity function of galaxies. We calculate and compile derivedquantities (for example, K-corrections and structural parameters for galaxies).The SDSS catalog presented here is photometrically recalibrated, reducingsystematic calibration errors across the sky from about 2% to about 1%. Weinclude an explicit description of the geometry of the catalog, including allimaging and targeting information as a function of sky position. Finally, wehave performed eyeball quality checks on a large number of objects in thecatalog in order to flag deblending and other errors. This catalog iscomplementary to the SDSS Archive Servers, in that NYU-VAGC's calibration,geometrical description, and conveniently small size are specifically designedfor studying galaxy properties and large-scale structure statistics using theSDSS spectroscopic catalog.