David Thomas Hill PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Chapter 1. Introduction: The luminosity distribution and total luminosity density of
galaxies
Schmidt (1965) and Burbidge & Burbidge (1965).
Mayall (1960) noted that the traditional method used to capture spectra, via short-focus,
long-duration photographic exposures, was becoming obsolete, as photoelectric scanning
of the spectra by the telescope gave a series of efficiency gains, vastly increasing capture
speed and eliminating the waste of time caused by interrupted exposures (due to atmo-
spheric conditions or instrument problems). Kintner (1971) and Rood et al. (1972) used
this new technology, in the form of an image-tube spectrograph on the 84 inch telescope
at Kitt Peak, to undertake a redshift survey particularly focused on the Coma Cluster.
Sandage (1978) obtained spectra for the fainter sources in the Shapley-Ames catalogue
that were not sampled by Humason et al. (1956). Redshifts from Humason et al. (1956)
and Sandage (1978) form the basis of the Revised Shapley-Ames catalog of bright galax-
ies (Sandage & Tammann, 1981); a compilation of all known morphological, photometric
and spectroscopic information for the Shapley & Ames (1932) galaxies. At this time, the
division between deep pencil-beam spectroscopic surveys, cluster surveys and shallow, all
sky surveys began: as Sandage (1978) was completing his work, other groups (e.g. Tifft
& Gregory 1976 and Kirshner et al. 1978) were undertaking specialised redshift surveys
over smaller areas.
The CfA redshift survey (Tonry & Davis, 1979; Huchra et al., 1983) was a large (∼ 2400
source) redshift survey, that sacrificed area of coverage (1.83sr of coverage in the North
galactic cap, 0.83sr in the South galactic cap) for depth (complete to mB = 14.5mag),
in order to examine structure beyond the Local Supercluster. This was cosmologically
important, allowing the clustering (Davis & Peebles, 1983) and homogeneity (Davis &
Huchra, 1982) of the Universe to be measured within a large volume of the Universe for
the first time, and providing early evidence for the large scale filamentary structures ob-
served today (Geller et al., 1987; Geller & Huchra, 1989). Redshift survey design became
influenced by the need to test numerical simulations (e.g., Davis et al. 1985; White et al.
1987). da Costa et al. (1989) extended the southern coverage of the CfA survey, as part
of the Southern Sky Redshift Survey (SSRS, da Costa et al. 1988), an attempt to map
a diameter-limited sample of galaxies within the Southern sky. Both the CfA and SSRS
projects were expanded, into CfA2 (Huchra et al. 1990, a Northern sky survey) and SSRS2
(da Costa et al. 1994, a Southern sky survey). Together, they contain approximately 10
thousand galaxies and cover over a third of sky to ∼ mB = 15.5mag.
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