format: text

text:
# The 𝑧=0 Galaxy Luminosity Function: I. Techniques for Identification of Dwarf Galaxies at ∼10 Mpc.Lick Bulletin No. 1399

## 1 Introduction

Knowledge of the galaxy luminosity function (GLF) is of fundamental importance to extragalactic astronomy and cosmology. Studies of the GLF in different density environments and at different redshifts provide us with the clues to answer questions about how galaxies were formed and how their properties and number counts have evolved. The local GLF is particularly important for two reasons. First, it is virtually impossible to observe faint, low-surface-brightness objects at cosmologically interesting distances. Our understanding of the luminosity density of the Universe must therefore come from observations of distant, high-luminosity galaxies in combination with an extrapolation to fainter objects based on measurements of the local GLF (while keeping in mind possible evolutionary effects). Second, in order to interpret faint galaxy counts in the context of evolution of galaxy properties and to map distant populations to local counterparts, the $`z=0`$ GLF is necessary for establishing a baseline of current-day properties and space densities for galaxies of all luminosities.

### 1.1 A Brief History of GLF Measurements

Because of the importance of the GLF, deriving it in different environments has been the subject of many investigations in the past two decades. There have been many approaches taken to estimate the GLF for the field, in the vicinity of luminous galaxies, in groups, in the nearby Virgo and Fornax clusters and in more-distant rich clusters. We make no attempt to give a complete overview of the field here. Pritchet & van den Bergh (1999) have a concise summary of recent studies of the GLF in different environments and Trentham (1998b) reviews GLF determinations in somewhat more detail. Impey & Bothun (1997) also review recent determinations of the GLF and have extensive discussions of issues specifically related to selection effects in studies of low-surface-brightness galaxies.

We use the standard Schechter function (Schechter, 1976) to describe the GLF. The number of galaxies per unit volume ($`\varphi `$) at luminosity $`L\pm dL/2`$ is given by

$$\varphi (L)dL=\varphi ^{}(L/L^{})^\alpha e^{L/L^{}}dL$$
(1)
where $`L^{}`$ is the luminosity of galaxies at the ‘break’ between the exponential form at high $`L`$ and power law at low $`L`$ and $`\varphi ^{}`$ is the space-density normalization. The characterization of the GLF to the lowest luminosities — dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies like Draco at $`M_R9`$ — is likely near complete only for the complement of companions to the Milky Way. Yet for the Local Group (LG), M31 dSph galaxies are still being discovered (e.g. Armandroff, Jacoby, & Davies, 1999) as are intra-group dSph (e.g. Lavery & Mighell, 1992; Karachentseva & Karachentsev, 1998). With the currently known members, the Schechter parameters for the LG are $`M^{}21;\alpha 1.1`$ for the $`R`$-band (Pritchet & van den Bergh, 1999).

Beyond the LG, GLF studies have been carried out for the field based on redshift catalogues and careful analysis of the selection function for the catalogues (e.g. Loveday et al., 1992; Marzke et al., 1994; Lin et al., 1996; Zucca et al., 1997; Marzke et al., 1998), in nearby clusters and groups (e.g. Sandage, Binggeli, & Tammann, 1985; Ferguson & Sandage, 1990; Zabludoff & Mulchaey, 2000) and in more distant clusters (e.g. Bernstein et al., 1995; Trentham, 1998a; de Propris & Pritchet, 1998). Despite this rich history of measurements, there is no consensus on the nature of the faint-end slope of the GLF and how it may depend upon environment and morphology. Recent studies in clusters have measured a steep faint-end slope (c.f. Trentham, 1998a; Hradecky et al., 2000), suggesting that higher density regions have a higher dwarf-to-giant ratio, yet some studies of the low-density field GLF have found similarly steep results (c.f. Zucca et al., 1997; Loveday, 1997). There is also evidence that the faint end varies with Hubble-type (e.g. Jerjen & Tammann, 1997; Marzke et al., 1998), color (e.g. Metcalfe et al., 1998), and emission-line strength (e.g. Christlein, 2000), and in some cases is contrary to what is found in the LG for similar environments. For example, the study of Marzke et al. (1998) includes both LG-density groups and the field and reports a relatively flat GLF for elliptical and spiral galaxies and a steeper GLF for peculiar and irregular galaxies, whereas in the LG the irregular GLF is relatively flat.

The majority of the studies outside the LG to date are restricted to galaxies brighter than $`M_R16`$, which only begins to probe the faint end of the GLF. Exceptions to this are (curiously) some of the studies of relatively distant clusters where the claimed low-luminosity limits are $`M_R12`$ (e.g. Coma, Bernstein et al., 1995). These studies have generally taken a statistical approach in subtracting off background and foreground contamination and have pushed the faint limits of their GLFs to the limits of the photometry. Potential problems with this approach (particularly at faint levels where the surface density of distant galaxies is high) are projection effects (Valotto, Moore, & Lambas, 2000) and the existence of large-scale structure giving rise to significant variations in the background counts as a function of position. Most studies concentrating on nearby groups and clusters (necessarily extending over large areas on the sky) have identified low-surface-brightness (LSB) dwarfs on photographic plates, usually followed up with CCD observations (e.g. in Virgo and M81; Impey, Bothun, & Malin 1988, Caldwell et al. 1998). Only recently have wide-field CCDs been available to cover similarly large expanses of the sky (c.f. Carrasco et al., 2001).

### 1.2 A New Survey

We have undertaken a program to measure the GLF to very faint levels in nearby ($`10`$ Mpc $`<`$ d $`<`$ 15 Mpc) galaxy groups using $`R`$-band MOSAIC CCD images for the initial survey and a number of different techniques to establish group membership of candidates on a galaxy-by-galaxy basis. Our primary goal is to measure the $`z=0`$ GLF to luminosity and completeness limits similar to that achieved in the LG. This will allow a test of the variation of the GLF between groups, decrease the shot noise in the GLF by combining samples or simply having a larger sample of galaxies than is present in the LG. Furthermore, it will provide a large sample of low-luminosity galaxies that are near enough to be amenable to fairly detailed studies of individual galaxy properties.

At these distances, dwarf galaxies, at least those represented in the LG, have apparent sizes $`>10^{\prime \prime }`$ at our surface-brightness limit (50% completeness) of $`\mu _R26`$ mag/$`^2`$. It may therefore be possible to identify dwarf-galaxy members purely on morphological grounds. The imaging data of our survey were taken with the MOSAIC camera on the KPNO 0.9-meter telescope (described more fully in §2) with the engineering-grade CCDs. Due to the poor blue response of these original chips, we imaged our survey with the Cousins $`R`$ filter. Figure 1 shows the positions of LG dwarfs as they would be seen at 10 Mpc in a plot of total magnitude vs. central surface brightness. LG dwarf properties are taken from Mateo (1998) and references therein, adopting $`BR1.3`$. The dashed lines show apparent sizes of galaxies with exponential profiles in this plane at a limiting surface brightness isophote of $`\mu _R=26.7`$ mag/$`^2`$. Most of the LG galaxies have diameters at this isophote level that are greater than 10′′.

We describe in detail our procedures for identifying intrinsically faint dwarf galaxies in the following sections. We note here that there are not very many types of objects known with the low central surface brightness level of a typical dSph. Distant high-luminosity galaxies are subject to $`(1+z)^4`$ surface brightness dimming and enter into our regime of interest, but these objects will typically be apparently small — a few arcseconds or less at our isophotal limit. Background large low-surface-brightness galaxies are potential sources of confusion with our method (Dalcanton et al., 1997) as are very distant galaxy clusters for which the main signature is a large, low-surface brightness enhancement due to the overlapping envelopes of the cluster galaxies (Zaritsky et al., 1997). However, with a somewhat conservative isophotal diameter limit of 10″ these objects should not be a significant contaminant. We will carry out group-membership studies (see §5.2) for at least a subset of our morphologically-identified candidate members.

The initial groups in this survey are the Leo I group (NBGC 15-01 or LGG 217, containing NGC 3379 and NGC 3368; Tully, 1988; Garcia, 1993) and the Coma I ‘cloud’ (NBGC 14-01 or LGG 279, containing NGC 4278 and NGC 4314; Tully, 1988; Garcia, 1993). In this paper we describe our algorithms for searching the frames for candidate group members, techniques for deriving photometric and structural properties of the candidates and simulations used to tune the search technique parameters and evaluate completeness and measuring errors. We also present examples of the initial findings. In a subsequent paper we will present the details of the observations, our candidate lists, charts, and the GLF.

## 2 Survey Imaging

This program begins with direct imaging using the MOSAIC Camera on the 0.9-meter telescope at KPNO. This camera gives a field of view $`1^{}`$ on a side and is comprised of eight $`2048\times 4096`$ CCDs, with sampling (unbinned) of 0.42 arcsec/pixel. The details of the observations for each group will be presented in the subsequent data papers. In short, nine fields were observed in the Leo Group and twelve fields in the Coma I Group. For most of the Leo Group observations the original engineering-grade CCDs of the MOSAIC were used. For each field, five 900-second exposures were made through the Cousins $`R`$ filter using the standard dithering routine with telescope offsets of $`40^{\prime \prime }`$ between the images. There were significant gaps between the CCDs ($`21\mathrm{}`$ N-S, $`15\mathrm{}`$ E-W ) in the MOSAIC and numerous cosmetic flaws in the engineering-grade CCDs. The purpose of the in-field dithering was to allow removal of these artifacts in the process of combining the five frames into a single image. In retrospect, we should have had a larger number of dithered pointings to better remove artifacts and improve our ability to flat-field on intermediate scales.

Our procedures for bias and dark subtraction, flat-fielding and combining the frames followed the steps detailed in the Guide to the MOSAIC Data Handling System (Valdes, 1998). To carry out this initial image processing we used the MSCRED package within IRAF111IRAF is distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, which are operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.. The preliminary processing of MOSAIC frames is somewhat complicated and will be discussed in detail in a subsequent paper. To do photometric calibration of the stacked MOSAIC images, we independently observed our Leo I and Coma I fields in $`B`$ and $`R`$ with the Lick Observatory 1-m Nickel telescope. The calibration is good to $`\pm 0.04`$ mag in $`R`$, but when we include the uncertainty in the color-term from our estimates of the $`BR`$ colors of the detected objects, the final galaxy photometric error is $`\pm 0.07`$ mag. Figure 2 highlights one of the nine fields imaged in the Leo I Group, with the 0.9-m fields overlaid upon a Digital Sky Survey image222Based on photographic data obtained using Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain. The Palomar Observatory Sky Survey was funded by the National Geographic Society. The Oschin Schmidt Telescope is operated by the California Institute of Technology and Palomar Observatory. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital format with their permission. The Digitized Sky Survey was produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute (ST ScI) under U. S. Government grant NAG W-2166.. The $`3\mathrm{°}\times 3\mathrm{°}`$ imaging area encompasses the 1$`\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}`$1 virial radius of the group (Tully, 1987). We analyze the indicated field (Field 7) to demonstrate our search and simulation algorithms. Our coverage of the Coma I group, while larger in extent ($`11`$ deg2) covers a smaller fraction of the extensive group ($`>25`$ deg2).

## 3 The Analysis Pipeline: Detecting Faint Galaxies

We have developed a three-step process for detecting dwarf galaxies at 10 Mpc. With the first, we detect high-surface-brightness (HSB) galaxies through a standard $`k`$-$`\sigma `$ thresholding technique using the SExtractor object detection and classification software (Bertin & Arnouts, 1996). In the second step, we use a search method we have optimized to find LG-like dwarf galaxies that would typically fall below the detection limits of most standard methods. We use a matched-filter technique for which the HSB galaxies and bright stars are masked, and the resulting image is convolved with an exponential filter representative of the structure of a LG dwarf at a distance of 10 Mpc. This second step of our detection process is based in part on the technique developed by Dalcanton (1995) to detect large low-surface-brightness (LSB) galaxies in the field from drift-scan data. In the third step of our analysis pipeline we characterize the detections and create a reliable candidate list from which to do further analysis and observations. In this section, we describe our detection methods and illustrate them in Figures 3 – 6.

### 3.1 Step 1: Traditional Detection Method

Before object detection, each image was pre-processed to remove the brightest objects from the image. We modeled the largest, most luminous galaxies in the field using the IRAF task ELLIPSE, and subtracted off their elliptical light components. This revealed objects near the line of sight of the large galaxies, as well as remaining structure in the galaxies. We then removed the outer light from all stars brighter than $`m_R10`$ — a somewhat arbitrary cut that removed the largest stars with diffraction spikes, but didn’t present an unreasonable number of stars to fit by hand. The saturated centers and diffraction spikes of the stars were masked with an IRAF routine that flags objects brighter than a specified threshold, and these masked objects were then replaced with a median-smoothed approximation of the background from SExtractor plus artificial noise added with the IRAF task MKNOISE. We modeled the resulting smoothed star image with ELLIPSE, and subtracted the modeled light from the original, unmasked image.

Once we rid our image of diffuse light from bright objects, we ran SExtractor in ‘single image mode’, where detection, photometry, and shape measurements were all done on the same input image. We set a 70-pixel minimum contiguous area for detection and a detection threshold of 1.5-$`\sigma _{sky}`$ above the sky. We required SExtractor to create noise maps of the image internally, and weight detections according to the noise characteristics of the section of the image where the detection was made. For star/galaxy separation, we used the object classifier of SExtractor, CLASS\_STAR, and kept only objects with CLASS\_STAR $`0.1`$ and semi-major axis of the SExtractor ellipse fit, A\_WORLD $`>1`$″, which corresponds roughly to an isophotal radius of 3″ (we found that for the smallest objects, SExtractor could no longer distinguish stars from galaxies). With the remaining objects, we fit radial profiles with ELLIPSE in IRAF, inputting the measured SExtractor shape parameters as initial fit values. We fit the one-dimensional isophotal profile of each galaxy output from ELLIPSE, assuming an exponential profile. We then characterize our detections from the traditional method by adopting the central surface brightness as extrapolated from the radial profile fit, and the magnitude as measured by SExtractor, MAG\_BEST. Of these objects we retain those with a limiting isophotal size at $`\mu _{lim}=26.7`$ of $`\mathrm{\Theta }_{lim}>10\mathrm{}`$ assuming an exponential profile with zero ellipticity (Allen & Shu, 1979). Further object selection was done through morphological membership selection on a galaxy-by-galaxy basis, examining each object by eye (described in §5). We used simulations (see §4) to tune all detection parameters used in this step.

To demonstrate the first step of our galaxy detection process, we show in Figure 3 a $`15\mathrm{}\times 15\mathrm{}`$ sub-section of our Field 7 image, on which we have placed simulated images of LG galaxies as they would appear at a distance of 10 Mpc (the galaxy simulation procedure is described in §4). We have modeled all dSphs as exponentials. Note that at this distance Leo II, Tucana, And V, and Carina are extremely difficult to detect by eye. In Figure 4, we show the results of Step 1, where an aperture is drawn around every object detected that is also classified as a galaxy by SExtractor (CLASS\_STAR $`0.1`$, A\_WORLD $`>`$1″). Many of the artificial LG dwarfs are detected; however, the lowest-surface-brightness objects, And II, Tucana, And V and Carina, are fainter than the 1.5-$`\sigma _{sky}`$ detection threshold.

### 3.2 Step 2: Optimized Detection Method

With the second method, we essentially removed all objects detected by the first method, and convolved the remaining background with a smoothing kernel to bring out LSB features. To remove all bright objects, we masked all HSB objects above a 2-$`\sigma _{sky}`$ surface-brightness threshold. We replaced the masked pixels in our field with a single background value plus noise added with MKNOISE (appropriate to the field). We then convolved the masked image, using the IRAF task CONVOLVE, with a kernel optimized to enhance fluctuations of the size and shape of LG-sized dwarf galaxies at 10 Mpc. In this example we used an exponential kernel with a 5$`\mathrm{}`$ scale length, as dSphs are known to be reasonably well-fit by exponential profiles ($`I=I_0e^{(r/\alpha )}`$; c.f. Faber & Lin, 1983; Vader & Chaboyer, 1994), and 5″ is a characteristic exponential scale length for LG dSphs if moved to 10 Mpc (Mateo, 1998). We find, however, that our detection rate is not overly sensitive to the shape of the convolving kernel.

We ran SExtractor in ‘double image mode’ on the resulting convolved images, where the detection and shape measurements were performed on the convolved image, but the corresponding photometric measurements were done on the original image. We set the detection limit to require a minimum area of 100 pixels above a 5.5-$`\sigma _{sky}`$ surface brightness threshold. The simulations in §4 were used to optimize these parameters. SExtractor’s photometry in double-image mode, however, tends to underestimate magnitudes and sometimes central surface brightnesses due to its inability to de-blend neighbor objects on the second (measurement) image. De-blending occurs here on the convolved image, where bright neighbors have been masked and so not included in de-blending. For final parameter measurement we fit radial profiles for each optimized detection, as discussed below.

There are a small number of spurious detections from this step, as the convolution process not only enhances features of a certain scale but also smoothes them in such a way that SExtractor’s neural network training for CLASS\_STAR can be fooled. However, most brightness enhancements detected in the convolved image can be culled by hand, as most of these false detections are obviously poorly masked stars and brighter galaxies. An example of such detections can be seen in Figure 5, where we show the masked, convolved image that corresponds to Figure 3. Here, all SExtractor detections from Step 2 are indicated: the obvious masking remnants detected are marked with crosses, and the candidate detections are marked with elliptical apertures.

In this example, all artificial LG dwarfs are detected, except Leo II. Note the large size of the elliptical apertures, which are roughly equivalent to the isophotal radii, for the input galaxy detections. We use the large apparent size of such dwarf galaxies to discriminate against more distant and typically apparently smaller galaxies.

One challenge for this search method is that the masking process may mask the higher-surface-brightness centers of the sort of very faint and extended galaxies we hope to detect. The convolution process may then smooth the remaining light, but the resulting convolved object will have a fainter peak luminosity and perhaps fall below the detection threshold. An example of this in Figure 5 is Leo II, which was detected in Figure 4, but is masked and undetected by the optimized method. One possible problem would be the case where an object falls just below the threshold of the traditional method, but is also masked and overlooked by the optimized method. To guard against these losses, we set the masking threshold (2-$`\sigma _{sky}`$) to be somewhat higher than the detection threshold for the traditional method (1.5-$`\sigma _{sky}`$), so that even though some objects will be partially masked in the optimized method, they are likely to have already been detected in Step 1. In this way, we have a number of intermediate-surface-brightness objects that are detected twice, but we minimize the chances of complete non-detections of such objects in this middle ground.

Objects detected via both methods, or by the optimized method alone, have an extended LSB component that falls below the traditional surface brightness threshold. For these objects, the traditional detection aperture misses this extended light, underestimating the total flux. Furthermore, the SExtractor magnitude measured by the optimized method tends to be skewed by bright neighbors that may fall within the measurement aperture, as mentioned earlier. We avoid these problems by measuring the isophotal radial profile with ELLIPSE, again fitting the profile with an exponential. We then characterize these detections with the fitted central surface brightness, $`\mu _0^{\mathrm{fit}}`$, as in the traditional method, but for the magnitude, we adopt the total magnitude calculated analytically from $`\mu _0^{\mathrm{fit}}`$ and the fitted exponential scale length, $`\alpha ^{\mathrm{fit}}`$.

In Figure 6, we plot the example detections from Figures 4 and 5 on the $`R_T\mathrm{vs}.\mu _0`$ plane. Here and in the following figures, $`R_T`$ is the total magnitude as measured by each detection method. Detections from the traditional method are indicated as crosses, where we plot the total magnitude measured by SExtractor (MAG\_BEST) and the central surface brightness parameters from the fitted profile. As in seen in §4.3, for these higher-surface-brightness galaxies, the profile fit does a good job estimating the central surface brightness, but uncertainties in the slope of the profile yield larger uncertainties in the calculated total magnitude than we see in the SExtractor magnitude measurement. We plot optimized detections as stars, where $`R_T`$ is now the total magnitude calculated analytically from $`\mu _0^{\mathrm{fit}}`$ and the fitted exponential scale length, $`\alpha ^{\mathrm{fit}}`$. The artificial input galaxies that were successfully detected are circled. Even though all the included objects are detected, Carina and And V represent the very limits of our detection method as will be seen in the following section. As mentioned previously, the proximity of the Leo I and Coma I groups makes dwarf galaxies large in angular size. This can be seen in Figure 6 in the separation of smaller, more compact background objects (the dense concentration of crosses centered around $`R_T19.5,\mu _022`$) and LG galaxy properties. Membership characterization will be discussed more fully in §5. The input galaxies (circled objects) all are measured with parameters comparable to their input values and so fall along the main locus of LG-like galaxies. Our ability to measure these parameters is explored with the simulations, as described in the next section.

## 4 Simulations

Two factors affect our ability to measure the GLF: (1) contamination from non-group members and artifacts, such as noise peaks or flat-fielding errors mistakenly selected through the optimized detection method, and (2) incompleteness in our detection method. We address the first on a galaxy-by-galaxy basis, guided by measured properties, morphology, and follow-up observations. The second we address via Montecarlo simulations in which we added artificial galaxies to the data frames and attempted to recover them with our detection processes described in §3. The final luminosity function will be membership-corrected for each of these effects. The final galaxy counts are the observed counts of member galaxies, $`n_{obs}=n_{obs}(R_T,\mu _0)`$, weighted by the detection efficiency as determined from the simulations, $`f(R_T,\mu _0)`$, where $`R_T`$ and $`\mu _0`$ are the input total magnitude and central surface brightness, respectively, of the artificial galaxies. Thus, the final galaxy counts for the GLF will be $`N(R_T,\mu _0)`$ = $`n_{obs}/f`$. We present a subset of these simulations here; the full simulations results will be presented in a subsequent paper.

### 4.1 Simulation Procedure

In order to understand the complex selection function and to tune our detection parameters for both steps in our detection method we have carried out extensive artificial-galaxy simulations. We create artificial galaxies covering the full range of the LG-dwarf magnitudes and central surface brightnesses (as seen at 10 Mpc), degrade them by the seeing and noise properties of the real data, add them to the real data frames and then detect them by the method described in §3. We calculate the detection efficiency as $`f(R_T,\mu _0)=n_{rec}/n_{add}`$, where $`n_{rec}`$ is the number of galaxies recovered and $`n_{add}`$ is the number of galaxies added for a given bin. The artificial galaxies populate the $`R_Tvs.\mu _0`$ plane spanning the ranges $`14R_T22`$, $`22\mu _026`$, roughly corresponding to the range wherein we would see LG-counterpart dSphs.

The artificial galaxies we created with the IRAF task MKOBJECT in the same manner as those shown in Figure 3. With MKOBJECT we input the magnitude zeropoint (which includes the color term for an adopted dwarf color of $`BR=1.3`$), read-noise, and seeing of our observations, and we specify an exponential radial profile, total magnitude, characteristic scale length, axial ratio, and position angle. The routine approximates the profile analytically and artificially truncates the profile at a cut-off radius where the profile intensity is $`10^5`$ times the peak intensity ($`12.5`$ mag below the peak). The dwarf galaxies we simulate are not significantly affected by this truncated dynamic range. Again, we adopt a purely exponential profile as it is known to be a good model for faint dSph galaxies and we include a uniform range of axial ratios to model the galaxies’ intrinsic ellipticities. LG compact dwarf ellipticals like M32 follow a de Vaucouleurs $`R^{1/4}`$-law, but their high central surface brightnesses (as can be seen by M32’s position in Figure 1) will make them easy to detect at these distances. Thus, we do not include these profile types in our simulations. There have long been discussions in the literature comparing the three-parameter King profile with the two-parameter exponential profile as the most appropriate for early-type dwarfs (see Ferguson & Binggeli 1994 and references therein), with exponentials being very similar to a King profile with large core radius and low concentration. Fainter dwarfs ($`M_R17`$) appear to be well-fit by an exponential at all radii yet brighter ($`M_R17`$) dwarfs, for which we see some profile flattening (e.g. Fornax dwarfs; Bothun, Impey, & Malin 1991) or excesses in the inner regions (Caldwell & Bothun, 1987), benefit from the more flexible King profile. We adopt an exponential profile for our fake galaxies for several reasons. First, a two-component model simplifies the parameter space we explore with our simulations. Second, deviations between these profiles in the core regions are minimized by the seeing convolution of our simulations at 10 Mpc. Finally, our simulations are most critical for the lowest luminosity regime ($`M_R>14`$), where the exponential profile is found to be the most prevalent.

For these simulations we neglected any internal structure, patchiness due to dust or HII regions and thus internal absorption. For dSph galaxies, this is appropriate. To a first approximation, this also tells us something about our $`R`$-band detection efficiency for dwarf irregulars, which typically have smoother and more extended disk of old, red stars underlying a younger and bluer stellar population that is well-fit by an exponential (Irwin & Hatzidimitriou, 1995). However, in order to fully probe the effects of substructure on detectability, we will add high signal-to-noise images of real LG dwarf irregulars (e.g. GR 8, IC 10) to our frames, scaled to a distance of 10 Mpc with comparable noise and seeing to our data, and will attempt to detect them with our method. This will be included in a subsequent paper.

We have randomly generated galaxy parameters uniformly in bins of size 0.5 mag/$`^2`$ in $`\mu _0`$ and 0.5 magnitudes in $`R_T`$, according to the appropriate radial profile. We then randomly distributed each galaxy in the image frame with a spatial density that allowed for a possible $`1\%`$ overlap of the area in input objects (assuming a maximum isophotal size at the 27 mag/$`^2`$ isophote). Preliminary simulations were first performed by adding exponential-profile galaxies with $`17R_T22`$, $`1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}6\alpha 6\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3`$ to a purely artificial noise frame, mimicking the noise characteristics of the CCD, in order to tune the simulation and detection algorithms. For the traditional method, we tuned the detection parameters solely to maximize the probability of detection. We found that a detection threshold of 1.5-$`\sigma _{sky}`$ vs. 2-$`\sigma _{sky}`$ made little difference, and so we chose the more generous threshold. We reduced the minimum detection area (DETECT\_MINAREA) based on the size of artificial LG galaxies moved to 10 Mpc, adopting the minimum isophotal area above the detection threshold of the faintest LG-like galaxies we expect to detect with the traditional method. Lastly, these simulations also helped us to tune the background mesh sizes (BACK\_SIZE), which governs how large a background area is effectively smoothed. We found the size did not significantly change the detection efficiencies.

The optimized detection parameters were also tuned from simulations with these purely artificial noise frames, which we found to be unrealistically flattened images compared with simulations done on the real data images. However, the general detection parameters could still be optimized with these more idealized simulations. We found that extremely low detection thresholds identified many random noise peaks in the convolved image as real detections. These preliminary simulations also tested the minimum area parameter, DETECT\_MINAREA, and the kernel size of the convolution filter. With a large DETECT\_MINAREA of 300 pixels we detected objects only along a narrow central surface brightness regime, and lost a significant number of small objects. Using a DETECT\_MINAREA of 100 pixels, we recovered almost all input objects in the parameter space tested. Changing the kernel size from a 5″ exponential to a 10″ exponential did not change the results dramatically, except insofar as the smaller kernel pushed the limiting central surface brightness a little fainter; thus, we adopted the smaller filter size.

Ultimately, we expanded the simulations, adding the objects to the real data frame for Field 7. The image has had the brightest galaxies modeled and subtracted, and the halos of light surrounding the brightest stars modeled and subtracted according to the procedure described in §3.2. Distributing galaxies in the real image probes not just the efficiency of the detection parameters, but also loss of chip area due to very bright objects and detection difficulties due to background inhomogeneities. We find that the latter difficulties with the background dominate the detection process in the optimized method.

With real data images we further tuned our optimized search method to avoid possible false detections. False detections can arise in the masked and convolved image from peaks in the noise and from flat-fielding artifacts (e.g. edges from the individual MOSAIC CCDs). Follow-up imaging of candidates and use of detectors with better cosmetics than the MOSAIC engineering-grade chips will ultimately eliminate almost all of these false detections. In the meantime, we can characterize the expected contamination from false detections, and tune our detection threshold to exclude them, using a negative version the current MOSAIC image. We first inverted the masked and background-subtracted version of the image, and then added the background back in. The resulting image is then convolved with the same kernel, and the optimized detection method applied. By inverting the image, we insure that the only possible detections are artifacts and not real objects. False detections from noise should happen equally often for the positive as for the negative image. Similarly, the MOSAIC CCD edge artifacts are the result of very slight illumination mismatches — both positive and negative — between the dithered images, so they create both positive and negative sharp edges in the convolved image. Other, more bizarre flat-fielding errors create structure that is also typically symmetric around the background level. Thus, on average, the inverted image should result in the same number of false detections from these types of contamination sources. For Field 7, we set our detection threshold for the optimized method to 5.5-$`\sigma _{sky}`$, at which level we find zero possible false detections that cannot easily be identified with an obvious flaw.

The total number of objects simulated in a parameter bin, $`n_{add}(R_T,\mu _0)`$, is determined by the criterion that the error in the final counts $`N(R_T,\mu _0)`$ contributed from the uncertainty in $`f`$ is small compared to the error contributed by Poisson variance in the observed counts, $`n_{obs}(R_T,\mu _0)`$. We adopt the error model for deriving stellar luminosity functions corrected by artificial star experiments of Bolte (1989). The uncertainty in a bin is given by

$`\sigma _N^2`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{n_{obs}}{f^2}}+{\displaystyle \frac{(1f)n_{obs}^2}{n_{add}f^3}}.`$ (2)
With this model our criterion becomes

$`{\displaystyle \frac{(1f)n_{obs}}{n_{add}f}}`$ $``$ $`1,`$ (3)
and in practice we require

$`n_{add}`$ $``$ $`100\times {\displaystyle \frac{(1f)n_{obs}}{f}}.`$ (4)
We add a preliminary minimum number of 100 galaxies for every bin and then run the experiments adding galaxies from appropriate bins until Equation 4 is satisfied.

### 4.2 Selection Function

The explored parameter space presented in this paper, $`17R_T22`$, $`22\mu _027`$, is a subset of the final simulation results to be presented in a subsequent paper, but encompasses the transition region between our traditional vs. optimized methods for the lowest luminosity dwarfs. The completeness fraction from these simulations is plotted in greyscale in Figure 7 as a function of $`R_T`$ and $`\mu _0`$, where the greyscale levels correspond to 10% (lightest), 30%, 50%, 70%, and 90% (darkest) completeness. The first two panels, Figures 7a and 7b, show $`f`$ as determined independently by the two detection methods, traditional and optimized, respectively. The fact that the optimized method complements the traditional method can be seen in these contours, where the optimized method pushes the completeness envelope to fainter surface brightness limits. The composite completeness factor combining both methods is represented in Figure 7c. LG galaxies if seen at a distance of 10 Mpc are plotted for comparison as filled circles, showing that at the $``$90% completeness level we can detect dwarfs comparable to Antlia and Sculptor and at the $``$50% completeness level we can detect dwarfs similar to Tucana and Leo II. The complexity of the selection function shows that the completeness of our survey cannot be characterized by just a magnitude limit or a surface brightness limit, but requires combining both effects. We can say that the faintest central surface brightness we reach at the $`50\%`$ level is around 25.7 mag/$`^2`$, and the faintest magnitude is around $`R_T20`$. In measuring profiles of our real and artificial galaxies, we robustly detect our objects to a limiting surface brightness isophote of 26.7 mag/$`^2`$.

### 4.3 Parameter Recovery

The simulated galaxy experiments can also give a measure of how robustly we measure structural parameters. For each object recovered, the radial profile is non-interactively measured during the simulation using the IRAF task ELLIPSE. We fit an exponential profile and determine the extrapolated central surface brightness, $`\mu _0`$, and the fitted exponential scale length, $`\alpha `$. We do not test our ability to discriminate between different profile shapes here.

In Figures 8–11, we demonstrate our ability to recover the input parameters central surface brightness, total magnitude, and exponential scale length. Our parameter recovery accuracy depends strongly upon the position of the galaxy in $`R_Tvs.\mu _0`$ parameter space, and as expected, significantly decreases as we approach our detection limits in either axis. Figure 8 shows the difference between input and output $`\mu _0`$ plotted as a function of input total magnitude, with the left panels showing all the artificial galaxies recovered by the traditional method, and the right panels those recovered only by the optimized method. In the vertical direction, we divide the artificial galaxies by input central surface brightness: $`22\mu _0^{\mathrm{in}}<23`$, $`23\mu _0^{\mathrm{in}}<24`$ and $`24\mu _0^{\mathrm{in}}25`$ from top to bottom. We can see our accuracy in parameter recovery decrease as the detection efficiency starts to fall, near $`R_T20`$. The limits on $`n_{add}`$ imposed by Equation 4 can be seen, for example, in panels a, b, and e, where there is a dramatic increase in the number of simulated galaxies for certain bins. The complementary nature of the two detection methods is also implicit in this figure and can be compared to Figure 7. Panel a shows the traditional method peaking in efficiency for $`\mu _0^{\mathrm{in}}22.5,17R_T19.5`$, and panel f shows the optimized method peaking for $`\mu _0^{\mathrm{in}}24.5,R_T17.5`$. We see in the right-hand panels that the lowest-surface-brightness galaxies detected only through the optimized method have a large scatter in $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _0`$. These objects are more difficult to fit due to their very low S/N which follows from their very low surface brightnesses, especially as we approach our detection limits (e.g. panel e).

In Figures 9 & 10, we show the magnitude recovery from the simulations, comparing the input magnitude to the SExtractor-measured magnitude in Figure 9, and to the total magnitude calculated from the fitted parameters in Figure 10. In each figure we show the difference in input and output total magnitude, $`\mathrm{\Delta }R_T=R_T^{\mathrm{out}}R_T^{\mathrm{in}}`$, as a function of $`R_T^{\mathrm{in}}`$, with the same panel divisions as the previous figure. First, we recover the expected offset in SExtractor MAG\_BEST in the left-hand panels of Figure 9. This offset results from SExtractor’s use of an aperture correction to approximate the total magnitude which is known to systematically miss some light at the $`0.06`$ magnitude level (Bertin & Arnouts, 1996). Second, we see in the right-hand panels of Figure 9, especially in panel d, evidence for the inability of SExtractor to de-blend objects properly when run in double-image mode, as discussed previously. We see the faintest galaxies tend to be measured brighter than they were input, as bright, neighboring objects that fall within the photometric aperture are mistakenly being included in the measurement. This would also introduce larger deviations from the true magnitude for fainter objects, and so we see the scatter increase in panels e and f. In comparing the results from the traditional method in Figures 9 and 10, we see that SExtractor MAG\_BEST does a slightly better job of measuring the magnitude than the total magnitude calculated from the profile fits, which is why we adopt MAG\_BEST for these detections. The larger scatter in $`\mathrm{\Delta }R_T`$ seen in the left-hand panels of Figure 10 are primarily due to difficulties in measuring the exponential scale length in the radial profiles, as can be seen in Figure 11. The considerable scatter in the right-hand panels of Figure 10 shows that, even inputting artificial exponential profiles, the noise at these low surface brightnesses makes automated profile fitting a difficult endeavor.

In Figure 11 we demonstrate our ability to recover the exponential scale length ($`\alpha `$) of the simulated galaxies with our profile fitting.Here we show the difference in input vs. output exponential scale length, $`\mathrm{\Delta }\alpha =\alpha ^{\mathrm{out}}\alpha ^{\mathrm{in}}`$, as a function of $`R_T^{\mathrm{in}}`$. Panels a – f are divided by central surface brightness in the same way as the previous figure. While the extrapolated central surface brightnesses for these galaxies are well recovered, as seen in Figure 8, we find that the slopes of the profile fits, which yield the exponential scale lengths, are much less well determined. An unsuccessful profile fit tends to approach the sky level, as background subtraction can be difficult for a low S/N object. On average this yields flatter fits for more difficult objects, and thus larger $`\alpha ^{\mathrm{out}}`$. We see this in our simulations, where the scatter in $`\mathrm{\Delta }\alpha `$ always tends towards $`\alpha ^{\mathrm{out}}>\alpha ^{\mathrm{in}}`$. Furthermore, the errors in $`\alpha ^{\mathrm{out}}`$ seem to dominate the calculated total magnitude at all magnitudes and central surface brightnesses, as the scatter in Figure 11 to preferentially larger $`\alpha ^{\mathrm{out}}`$ roughly corresponds to scatter in Figure 10 to preferentially brighter $`R_T^{\mathrm{out}}`$ (i.e. $`\mathrm{\Delta }R_T0`$). Finally, we see again that for the majority of the objects detected only through the optimized method (which are typically of the lowest surface brightness or lowest S/N), $`\alpha `$ is very difficult to determine.

Some of our difficulties in measuring the profiles of the faintest and lowest-surface-brightness galaxies are mitigated for our real candidate detections by interactive profile fitting and deeper follow-up imaging in the future. We note that most photometric studies of galaxies with similar properties as our artificial galaxies are likely affected to similar levels.

## 5 Preliminary Results

To demonstrate the success of our method, we present a preliminary sample of objects detected in Leo I. First, we show the measured properties of objects found over the one-square-degree image of Field 7, and discuss how these properties can illuminate these objects’ group membership. Second, we examine several objects from the group in more detail, presenting examples of the types of supplementary observations we will also use to constrain membership and contamination. Among these objects we include a newly discovered dSph in Leo I which has comparable properties to a dSph like Sculptor ($`M_R=11.11,\mu _0=23.39R`$ mag/$`^2`$). We also show exciting examples of how we may use the classic test of resolving our dwarf galaxies into stars to establish their membership as done by Baade (1944) to confirm M32 and NGC 205 as companions to M31, as well as using surface brightness fluctuations (SBF) for relative distance determination. Lastly, we show a preview of the contribution these detections make to the faint end of the GLF.

### 5.1 Field 7 Objects

As mentioned previously, our object search process and membership determination are guided by our knowledge of objects found in the LG. We know that most dwarfs at a distance of 10 Mpc will subtend a large angle on the sky ($`>20\mathrm{}`$), plus appear distinctly diffuse (LSB) with a roughly flat radial profile. This was shown visually in Figure 3. In addition, the more luminous late-type galaxies at 10 Mpc will have resolved structure such as spiral arms, patchiness and HII regions. Early-type galaxies, the LG example being M32, have extremely bright central surface brightnesses and steep radial profiles which fall off quickly in angular size with increasing distance. These morphological criteria, covering the most common morphological types we find locally, allow for elementary membership assignment which distinguishes group members from very distant background galaxies (c.f. Sandage & Binggeli, 1984). Although these criteria have been very successfuly employed, for instance, for the Virgo Cluster Catalog (Drinkwater et al., 1996), this morphological classification can begin to break down for more nearby background galaxies, as well as for more unusual types of galaxies not found in the LG. Such types of galaxies are dwarf S0 galaxies (Sandage & Binggeli, 1984), BCGs (Thuan, 1983) and their subset, the so-called HII galaxies (Telles & Terlevich, 1997), and large, very low-surface-brightness disks (Impey et al., 1988). In these less certain cases, we can begin to discriminate non-group-member galaxies by further characterizing our sample using their measured properties such as total magnitude, central surface brightness, and radial profile shape.

We present the properties of our detections from the entire one-square-degree image of Field 7 in Figure 12, plotted in the same way as Figure 6. The detections in this figure include contamination from background non-group-members, which appear most prominently near $`R_T19.5,\mu _022`$. The crosses show all detections from the traditional method after star/galaxy separation (as in Figure 6). The plotted parameters for these objects (the crosses) are the total magnitude as measured by SExtractor and the central surface brightness as extrapolated from the radial profile fit. Objects detected through the optimized method are shown as stars. The plotted parameters for these detections are both calculated from the profile fit. Objects detected by both methods are connected by a line. For comparison we show again LG dwarfs scaled to a distance of 10 Mpc, which are marked by filled circles.

Again we see the effectiveness of this plot as the smaller, more compact objects that are mostly distant background galaxies separate out from the expected locus of LG-like dwarfs. This also follows from the radial profiles, and thus morphologies, we expect from known galaxy types, which can be qualitatively seen in Figure 1. For example, early-type, de-Vaucouleurs-profile galaxies do not populate this LSB regime of parameter space shown in Figure 12 unless they are very distant, cosmologically dimmed objects, and even then their small angular sizes would make them virtually undetectable within our limits.

The galaxies circled in Figure 12 are described in more detail in Figures 13 – 16, where we show a 2′$`\times `$2′ postage stamp of the MOSAIC $`R`$-band image for each example and its radial profile measured with ELLIPSE. In Figure 13a we show one of the larger, higher-SB galaxies in Field 7. This is a previously catalogued object, CGCG 065-091 (Zwicky et al., 1968), which has a measured velocity listed in NED333NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database of 7922 km s-1 (Fouqué et al., 1992). Note that it shows a sign of spiral structure, but without the well-defined spiral arms of NGC 3351. Neither does it have the expected size and magnitude of a Sbc galaxy at 10 Mpc. The radial profile of CGCG 065-091 is shown in Figure 13b, where the disk and bulge components can be seen. Based upon its morphology and properties, this galaxy is likely to be in the background of the Leo I group, and this fact is corroborated by its velocity. The previously uncatalogued galaxy shown in Figure 14a is a likely non-member from the other extreme of parameter space, having a small isophotal size as indicated by the detection aperture, and having photometric properties ($`R_T=19.66,\mu _0=22.04`$) in Figure 12 outside those expected for LG-type dwarfs. The profile in Figure 14b is mostly dominated by seeing, due to its small angular size at our isophotal limits, but suggests an exponential profile. The profile fit parameters, however, are inconsistent with those expected for LG-type dwarfs ($`\alpha ^{\mathrm{fit}}`$ = 1$`\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}`$41, $`\mu _0^{\mathrm{fit}}`$= 21.95).

In Figures 15 and 16 we show two objects which are each detected by both the traditional and the optimized method. In each figure, we show in panel (a) the original MOSAIC image with the detection aperture from the traditional method indicated, in panel (b) the masked image with the detection aperture for the optimized method indicated and in panel (c) the convolved image with the optimized detection aperture again indicated. A comparison of the aperture sizes in panels (a) and (c) directly contrasts the two detection methods: the detection threshold of the traditional method in (a) only detects the bright center of the galaxy, whereas the optimized method in (c) also detects an extended, low-surface-brightness component. The extremely low surface brightness and extended sizes of these objects suggest they are dSphs in Leo I, and the object in Figure 15 might be a nucleated dwarf.

We plot the radial profiles for these two objects in panel d of Figures 15 and 16. The profiles extend to $`\mu (r)26R`$ mag/$`^2`$ out to $`1.6\alpha ^{\mathrm{fit}}`$ for Figure 15d, and somewhat further in Figure 16d, $`\mu (r)28R`$ mag/$`^2`$ out to $`3.4\alpha ^{\mathrm{fit}}`$. We fit both profiles with an exponential component, adopting $`\mu _0^{\mathrm{fit}}`$and $`R_T^{\mathrm{fit}}`$. In Figure 15d, where we see the suggestion of a nucleus, we fit only the exponential component. If the nucleus is real, it should contribute only a small amount to the total flux of the object ($`15\%`$ for the faintest galaxies), as has been seen for nucleated dwarfs found in the Virgo cluster (Sandage & Binggeli, 1984; Impey et al., 1988). In addition, excluding the nucleus from the fit makes the underlying dwarf characteristics more directly comparable to dwarf counterparts in the LG (although, the nature of the nucleus and its relationship to the underlying stellar population is still not well known). The final parameters of these galaxies support their classification as dwarf spheroidal members of Leo I.

### 5.2 Supplementary Observations

Although we have some confidence in the identification of Leo-group dwarf galaxy members on the basis of morphology, total magnitude and central surface brightness (i.e. the location of candidates in Figure 12), we are planning and engaged in follow-up observations. To measure a completely reliable GLF, we would like to verify membership for every Leo member candidate. Particularly for the low-surface-brightness candidates, this is an ambitious undertaking. One important side benefit of the follow-up observations is that when our final list of Leo Group galaxies is assembled, we will have a significant database of the structural, photometric, and in some cases, spectral properties of the ensemble. We have three on-going programs described in the following subsections.

#### 5.2.1 Multi-color imaging

Follow-up imaging of our candidates can provide a fuller characterization of very low-luminosity galaxies in an environment similar to, but distinct from, the LG. In addition, the lowest-surface-brightness candidates, which are primarily detected through our filtering search technique, can be subject to contamination by some false detections and high-$`z`$ galaxies and galaxy clusters. Because of the difficulty in flat-fielding the MOSAIC images and the difficulty in completely removing chip flaws and the intra-CCD dead regions in the final stacked image, some of our candidates in the MOSAIC fields are going to be spurious. Imaging each candidate with another telescope will quickly allow us to cull such detections from our list. Our filtering technique also makes us sensitive to background LSB disk galaxies (we expect $`4`$/deg2, Dalcanton et al., 1997), cosmologically-dimmed $`z>0.4`$ galaxies and $`z>0.6`$ galaxy clusters ($`1`$/deg2; A. H. Gonzalez 2000, private communication). These candidates are difficult to reach spectroscopically; however, with follow-up imaging in $`B`$ and $`I`$, the three colors (we have $`R`$ from the 0.9m+MOSAIC imaging) can flag higher-$`z`$ galaxy and cluster contamination due to their very red colors. In Figure 17, adapted from Fukugita, Shimasaku, & Ichikawa (1995), we show the distribution of $`BR`$ for various morphological types as they change with redshift (generally increasing to the right). The circled values are for $`z=0`$, squares are $`z=0.2`$, triangles are $`z=0.5`$ and hexagons are $`z=0.8`$. Measured values for LG galaxies today fall along the $`z=0`$ locus. Note that all objects with $`BR>1.7`$, according to these models, have $`z0.2`$. Multiple colors can provide a broader baseline for such discrimination, although such color classification must also be approached conservatively, as such models do not account for unusual objects, such as the very red LSB galaxies recently discovered by O’Neil, Bothun, & Schombert (2000).

#### 5.2.2 Spectral observations

It is possible to obtain spectra suitable for measuring radial velocities for a large fraction of the candidates. We have already devoted two Keck nights and two Lick 3m nights to this effort with many more required to complete the follow-up of the Leo Group candidates. Figure 18 shows an example candidate (2$`{}_{}{}^{}\times 2^{}`$ postage stamp from our MOSAIC image) and its spectrum. In this case the spectrum was obtained with the Lick 3m+KAST spectrometer in a $`3\times `$900s exposure, and the velocity calculated via the cross-correlation with a velocity template. The velocity in this case, 6525 km s-1, showed this object to be background to the group. Figure 19 shows a more challenging example, which is an object previously catalogued by Ferguson & Sandage (1990) corresponding to LEO #13 in their catalog list. This spectrum required 1.5 hours integration with Keck II$`+`$LRIS and cross-correlating with a velocity template to extract a velocity. For this object, one of the best candidate dSph galaxies, we measure the velocity of 886 km s-1, indicating this is a bona-fide Leo Group dwarf.

#### 5.2.3 Red Giant Branch Tip and Surface brightness fluctuations

At a distance of $`10`$ Mpc ($`mM30`$) it is possible to use two additional photometry-based methods to test for group membership for our candidate Leo dwarfs. The brightest of the first-ascent red-giant-branch stars, at $`M_I4`$, will be measurable at $`m_I26`$ mag in Hubble Space Telescope images or with large ground-based telescopes and good seeing. Sakai et al. (1997) used a modest amount of HST observing time to demonstrate this for the Leo Group giant elliptical NGC 3379. Their observations were made in an outer region of the galaxy at a surface brightness ($`\mu _B27.1,\mu _I25.2`$) which is very similar to the central surface brightness of our most diffuse candidates. The tip of the red-giant branch (TRGB) was easily detected.

Measurement of surface brightness fluctuations has proven to be a powerful method for estimating distances to galaxies to beyond the distance of the Virgo cluster and also as a means of inferring the stellar populations in galaxies. NGC 3379 in the Leo I Group has also been used to to demonstrate this technique (Tonry & Schneider, 1988). Bothun et al. (1991) showed that low-surface-brightness dwarf galaxies in the Fornax cluster are particularly well-suited for use of this technique and more recently it has been applied specifically to low-surface-brightness dwarfs (e.g. O’Neil, Bothun, & Impey, 1999; Jerjen, Freeman & Binggeli, 2000). This method has the potential for allowing membership to be determined for the most challenging of the Leo LSB dwarf candidates — those with the lowest central surface brightness. Although there is potential for learning about the stellar populations in any Leo Group members, we will initially be performing a binary test for membership. The candidate Leo I galaxies will generally either be near 10 Mpc or at a much larger distance in the background. The brightest giants will be resolved or not; the LSB galaxies will show measureable fluctuation or not.

In March 2000, we imaged several of the dSph candidates with the new imaging spectrograph ‘ESI’ on the Keck II telescope. With these data we can show the promise of the TRGB and SBF techniques for our specific application. For three of the galaxies, imaged under excellent conditions with point sources showing $`<0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}5`$ FWHM, the galaxies just barely resolved into stars in only a 10min exposure in the $`I`$ band. Figure 20 shows an example of one of our ‘resolved’ candidates (the same object as in Figure 19). Such excellent seeing conditions are not to be counted on for ground-based imaging and we do not expect to be able to survey a large number of dwarf candidates with this technique from the ground. With HST however, the TRGB stars in Leo Group LSB dwarfs can be resolved in approximately 20 min observing time.

It is possible to measure SBF for Leo I dwarfs with ground-based imaging. Figure 21 shows the fluctuation power spectrum for the galaxy from the previous example. In Figure 21, we compare the power spectrum from a section of the galaxy with no discernable brightness gradient (filled boxes) to the power spectrum of a star (stars) and to a blank section of the sky (triangles). Note that at large $`k`$, you see the constant signature of the white noise spectrum, whereas at small $`k`$, you see the PSF-like signature of both the star and the underlying unresolved stars in the galaxy image. This contrasts with the spectrum of the sky, where there is only a very weak PSF contribution from unresolved background galaxies. We have also estimated the amplitude of fluctuations via the method described in Bothun et al. (1991). The variance in counts was measured in multiple 100-pixel boxes placed in ‘sky’ regions of the frame and in six positions within the galaxy after point sources were removed and a median-smoothed version of the image was subtracted out to remove the large-scale gradients in the galaxy profile. The excess fluctuation signal above that expected in the sky plus galaxy is $`9`$% of the galaxy signal. We are unambigously measuring the pixel-to-pixel variations due to the small number of average-luminosity giants over the face of the galaxy. Rather than attempting to derive an absolute calibration for distance based on our SBF measurements in the Leo I candidates, we will be able to make a differential distance estimate comparing to SBF measured at different surface brightness levels in NGC 3379 (and possibly correcting for stellar population differences based on color).

### 5.3 Preliminary GLF

With our preliminary membership assignment, we can begin to measure the GLF. In Figure 22 we present a histogram of absolute $`R`$-band magnitudes (assuming $`mM=30`$ based on cepheid measurements in NGC 3351; Graham, et al., 1996) for objects found in Field 7 that are likely members. While this is not a robust measurement of the galaxy luminosity density for the group (we reserve this analysis to a later paper with the full group sample), we note that even with a preliminary membership classification, we probe fainter magnitudes than have been studied in the Leo I group to date. The nominal 100% completeness limit of Ferguson & Sandage (1990) is $`M_{B,lim}=14.2`$ (Ferguson & Sandage values adjusted for $`mM=30`$), which for $`BR`$ = 1.3 corresponds to $`M_{R,lim}=15.5`$. Their photographic survey, which covers a comparable area on the sky, used an isophotal diameter limit of 17″ at $`\mu _B=27`$ mag/$`^2`$, and beyond this limit they applied an incompleteness correction based upon the expected range of the $`\mu _eB_T`$ relation as measured in Fornax (Ferguson & Sandage, 1988). They find this correction to be small out to $`M_B11.2`$ ($`M_R12.5`$), although their completeness description does not account for objects of lower surface brightness for a given magnitude than predicted by the $`\mu _eB_T`$ relation like those recently discovered in Fornax (Kambas et al., 2000). This would suggest a larger incompleteness fraction at lower magnitudes, as well as perhaps an even steeper faint-end slope than the $`\alpha =1.4`$ predicted in Ferguson & Sandage (1991). One of the real advantages of our simulation method is that we explore these possible surface brightness selection effects. We see from our simulations, and from our candidate lists that, even at faint surface brightnesses, we can detect objects to $`M_R>11`$.

## 6 Discussion

Even without full membership determination, we have demonstrated the success of our method in discovering dwarf spheroidal galaxies in the Leo I group. With the advent of MOSAIC imaging, we combine a very wide-field survey with the advantages of CCD photometry and can now explore nearby galaxy groups to the same sensitivities as were previously available only for smaller, and so more distant, galaxy groups and clusters. At the 70% completeness limit for this field, we extend our survey at least 2 magnitudes beyond the photographic work done by Ferguson & Sandage (1991) for $`\mu _024.5`$, discovering dwarf spheroidals like that shown in Figure 16. We also find an example (Figure 15) of the large, LSB dwarfs first discovered in Virgo (Impey et al., 1988) — objects which are apparently absent from the Local Group. This object corresponds to LEO #5 in the Ferguson & Sandage (1990) catalog.

One possible limitation of our sample selection is that our methods are optimized to search for the typical objects we would expect in the Local Group. This can lead to some prejudices. For instance, very compact, faint objects we classify as background, assuming the faintest galaxies will be diffuse dwarf spheroidals. Overall, this is justified since the only type of compact dwarf seen the local Universe is M32-like, and we detect no objects with such high central surface brightnesses that SExtractor classifies as galaxies (distant objects with these bright $`\mu _0`$ are so compact they are classified as stars by SExtractor). Furthermore, all similarly compact objects detected in the Leo I group by Ferguson & Sandage (1990), which were classified as possible M32-like candidates but also as non-members, were later spectroscopically confirmed as background galaxies (Ziegler & Bender, 1998). However, unusually compact objects not seen in the LG, or BCDs, might be lost from our sample in this way. Other objects not seen in the LG are the large, LSB dwarfs seen in Virgo (Impey et al., 1988), Fornax (Bothun et al., 1991) and M81 (Caldwell et al., 1998). In Fornax a population of extreme LSB dwarfs was detected that could rival the brighter galaxies in integrated luminosity and mass (Kambas et al., 2000). Although we don’t preferentially search for this type of galaxy, we find from our simulations that the sensitivity of our search method peaks for bright (i.e. large) LSB dwarf galaxies like these. So, if such objects exist in large numbers in Leo I (we find only one in Field 7), we will detect them.

Our understanding of the LG also leads us to expect dwarfs to cluster as satellites around brighter, companion galaxies. This correlation is seen in some other low density environments (Vader & Sandage, 1991; Loveday, 1997), although there are hints that the dwarf-giant correlation is lowest in poor group environments, where dwarfs might even be ‘free-floating’ (Vader & Chaboyer, 1992). To explore this, we have tried to recover as much area as possible surrounding the large galaxies in our sample, but for late-type, $`L^{}`$ galaxies like NGC 3351 in Field7, there would be significant confusion of diffuse dwarfs with any residual structure from the profile subtraction, such as HII regions and spiral arms. Thus, we ignore any detection within a projected distance of $`4`$′ (11.5 kpc) around NGC 3351. Despite this limitation, however, we would still expect to detect a significant fraction of a satellite dwarf population. The characteristic distance of a Milky Way dwarf satellite is at a projected distance of 141 kpc from the Galaxy (Karachentsev, 1996), which would correspond to $`48`$′ at 10 Mpc, and the corresponding distance for M31 satellites is 85 kpc (Karachentsev, 1996), or $`30`$′ at 10 Mpc. As we do not see the Milky Way satellites in projection, it is difficult to quantify how many would fall too close to the Galaxy to be detected. In the case of M31 satellites, two objects would fall within 4′ of the main galaxy, but these are M32 and NGC 205 which cause little concern for confusion.

The primary limiting factor for these data is the nature of the engineering-grade CCDs used in the MOSAIC camera for the majority of our Leo I images. Even modest brightness enhancements due to lack of flatness of the images can be enhanced through our filtering process, forcing us to raise our detection threshold to exclude possible spurious detections. With flatter images, we can lower our threshold and push our limits to fainter surface brightnesses and magnitudes. MOSAIC images of our Fields 8 and 9 were taken with the newer science-grade CCDs last Spring, and will provide this comparison. Our current limitations are well quantified, however, with our simulations.

The galaxy simulations not only highlight selection effects in detection, but also our ability to measure photometric parameters for these candidate galaxies. As we have shown in §4.3, parameter recovery can be rather difficult for the lowest-luminosity and lowest-surface-brightness objects. Part of this difficulty is in using an automated process, and for all real objects detected through the optimized method, we opt to fit them by hand. Full understanding of these challenges to our photometry provides a robust and direct measurement of our errors.

The discovery of dwarf spheroidal galaxies outside the Local Group is a burgeoning pursuit that has begun to yield tantalizing results in a number of environments (e.g. Virgo and Dorado clusters; Phillipps et al., 1998; Carrasco et al., 2001). With theoretical models predicting a steep faint-end slope to the GLF (Cole et al., 2000) and detections of possible bright dSph progenitors seen at $`z>0.2`$ (Guzman et al., 1998), it is critical to establish a census of these low-luminosity galaxies at $`z=0`$. As we clearly establish the selection parameters influencing our sample, we can construct the only complete sample of dwarf galaxies to these luminosities and surface brightnesses outside of the Local Group. Furthermore, with such a sample we may explore the intrinsic nature of these galaxies as an ensemble, such as their spatial distribution, abundances, and stellar populations.

We thank the referee, G. Bothun, for useful comments and a careful reading of the manuscript. KF thanks A. Gonzalez for many helpful discussions. MB acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation through the grant AST-9901256 which has funded most of this work. KF and AJM also acknowledge support from the California Space Grant Consortium through a fellowship and a mini-grant. CMO thanks the Brazilian funding agency FAPESP for financial support. This research 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 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.