The brightness and color of a surface depends on its contrast with nearby surfaces. For example, a gray surface can appear very light when surrounded by a black surface or dark when surrounded by a white surface. Some theories suggest that perceived surface brightness and color is represented explicitly by neural signals in cortical visual field maps; these neural signals are not initiated by t...

We measured infrared surface brightness uctuation (SBF) distances to an isotropically-distributed sample of 16 distant galaxies with redshifts reaching 10,000 km s 1 using the near-IR camera and multi-object spectrometer (NICMOS) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The excellent spatial resolution, very low background, and brightness of the IR uctuations yielded the most distant SBF measuremen...

Using the Early Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) we investigated the clustering properties of Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies in comparison to normal, High Surface Brightness (HSB) galaxies. We selected LSB galaxies and HSB galaxies with well measured redshifts from the SDSS data base and performed three-dimensional neighbour counting analysis within spheres of radii be...

Surface brightness evolution has been detected in elliptical galaxies (consistent with passive evolution models of old stellar populations) and in disk galaxies (presumably due to enhanced star-formation rates). The rates of evolution in clusters and the field are not measurably different. In addition to this similarity, the high-redshift populations in both environments exhibit a “blue-excess”...

We reconsider the problem of the age of the stellar discs of late-type Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies by making use of a new IMF recently derived from numerical fluid dynamical simulations (Padoan, Nordlund and Jones, 1997). While a Miller-Scalo IMF cannot adequately describe the photometric properties of LSBs, when we apply the new Padoan et al. (1997) IMF to a simple exponential disc m...