Conclusions and Future Directions

A wide field flux limited survey for HI luminous galaxies hidden in the northern ZOA has been completed. With approximately 60% of the data analyzed we have detected 36 galaxies, 23 of which were previously unknown. Given the number found to date, in the full survey we expect to detect around 60 sources, which falls within our survey predictions of 50-100 galaxies.

Since the DOGS slice covers a wide range of the extragalactic sky including portions of the Local Supercluster and the Local Void, the collected sample will be well suited for a comparison study of galaxies in different environments.

Efforts are also underway to quantify the Galactic extinction, a poorly known quantity near the Galactic plane. Although the recently released DIRBE reddening maps (Schlegel et al. 1998) prove useful, they remain uncalibrated at low latitude (|b| 10). We are exploring the possibility of using near-infrared colors of galaxies from 2MASS data to independently determine the extinction and to thereby determine calibration constants and uncertainties for the DIRBE maps at low latitude.

б© Copyright Astronomical Society of Australia 1997