The Hawaii K-band galaxy survey .2. Bright K-band imaging

We present the results of a wide-held K-selected galaxy survey with complementary optical I- and B-band imaging in six fields with a total coverage of 9.8 deg(2). The observations were carried out on the University of Hawaii 0.6 m and 2.2 m telescopes. The purpose of this survey is to study the properties of the local galaxies and explore the evolution of K-selected galaxies at low redshifts. Star-galaxy discrimination is performed using both galaxy color properties and object morphologies, and 6264 galaxies are found. This survey establishes the bright-end K-band galaxy number counts in the magnitude range 13 < K < 16 with high precision. We find that our bright-end counts have a significantly steeper slope than the prediction of a no-evolution model, which cannot be accounted for by known observational or theoretical error. We argue also against the likelihood of sufficient evolution at such low redshifts to account for this effect; we describe an alternative picture in which there is a local deficiency of galaxies by a factor of 2 on scale sizes of around 300 h(-1) Mpc. Taken at face value, this would imply that local measurements of Omega(0) underestimate the true value of the cosmological mass density by this factor and that local measurements of H-0 could be high by as much as 33%.