The SBF Method measures the irreducible mottling in an early-type galaxy image due to the Poisson fluctuations in the finite number of stars per pixel. It was pioneered by John Tonry and Don Schneider (1988, AJ, 96, 807). The method has important applications for both extragalactic distance and stellar population studies. Click here for a fairly recent review of the SBF method, and here for a nice graphic, made by John Tonry, illustrating the method.

The SBF Survey of Galaxy Distances. This is a project to determine the distances to the nearest 300 elliptical and S0 galaxies by measuring their surface brightness fluctuations. The main players are John Tonry, Ed Ajhar, Alan Dressler, and myself.   Paper I, Paper II, Paper III, and Paper IV of the survey are out!   Paper IV contains data tables of SBF magnitudes, colors, and distances that can be downloaded as table.good and table.poor. With Michael West, I have worked on a study of the structure of the Virgo cluster using SBF Survey distances.

SBF as a Stellar Population Probe. SBF is also useful for stellar population synthesis studies. A recent paper by Blakeslee, Vazdekis, & Ajhar (2000, MNRAS, in press) discusses this in more detail. Another, complementary, perspective is provided by Liu, Charlot, & Graham (2000, ApJ, in press). See Alexandre Vazdekis' modeling page for more details on our SBF predictions and more information on Alex's models.

The Fundamental Plane and Surface Brightness Fluctuations.  Along with John Lucey at Durham University, UK and others, I have derived fundamental plane (FP) photometric parameters for the SBF survey galaxies and combined them with velocity dispersions from the SMAC project (Hudson, Lucey, Smith, Davies, & Schlegel). Here are two papers that present comparisons of the various early-type galaxy properties and the derived FP and SBF distances.).

SBF studies with the Hubble Space Telescope. The superb resolution of HST affords an enormous advantage over ground-based observations for SBF studies. There are a number of SBF projects that use HST's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.   One of these is a program to measure SBF distances to early-type galaxies which have hosted Type Ia Supernovae (SBF-SNIa  paper). I'm also looking forward to SBF observations with the Advanced Camera. Stay tuned.