A Catalogue of Morphologically Classified Galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: North Equatorial Region

We present a catalogue of morphologically classified bright galaxies in the north equatorial stripe (230 deg$^2$) derived from the Third Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Morphological classification is performed by visual inspection of images in the $g$ band. The catalogue contains 2253 galaxies complete to a magnitude limit of $r=16$ after Galactic extinction correction, selected from 2658 objects that are judged as extended in the photometric catalogue in the same magnitude limit. 1866 galaxies in our catalogue have spectroscopic information. A brief statistical analysis is presented for the frequency of morphological types and mean colours in the catalogue. A visual inspection of the images reveals that the rate of interacting galaxies in the local Universe is approximately 1.5% in the $r\le16$ sample. A verification is made for the photometric catalogue generated by the SDSS, especially as to its bright end completeness.
Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomical Journal. Table 2 available at http://www.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~fukugita/MCGpaper/table2.txt