Surface photometry of nearby field galaxies: The data

We have obtained integrated spectra and multifilter photometry for a representative sample of similar to 200 nearby galaxies. These galaxies span the entire Hubble sequence in morphological type, as well as a wide range of luminosities (M(B) = -14 to -22) and colors (B-R = 0.4-1.8). Here we describe the sample selection criteria and the U, B, R surface photometry for these galaxies. The spectrophotometric results will be presented in a companion paper. Our goals for the project include measuring the current star formation rates and metallicity of these galaxies, and elucidating their star formation histories, as a function of luminosity and morphology. We thereby extend the work of Kennicutt to lower luminosity systems. We anticipate that our study will be useful as a benchmark for studies of galaxies at high red-shift. We discuss the observing, data reduction, and calibration techniques and show that our photometry agrees well with previous work in those cases in which earlier data are available. We present an atlas of images, radial surface brightness profiles, and color profiles as well as tables of derived parameters. The atlas and tables of measurements will be made available electronically. We study the correlations of galaxy properties determined from the galaxy images. Our findings include the following: (1) colors determined within the effective radius correlate better with morphological type than with M(B) and (2) 50% of the low-luminosity galaxies are bluest in their centers.