This part of our UV/optical atlas of galaxies has compared vacuum UV imagery and photometry at 1500 and 2500 Å of selected nearby galaxies of all types obtained with the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope during the Astro-1 mission with optical band data. The second part of the atlas (Kuchinski et al. 2000) discusses 1500 Å data from the Astro-2 mission for a sample of mainly face-on spiral galaxies. Later papers will discuss our UV/optical photometry, quantitative morphological comparisons, and simulations of the appearance of high-redshift objects based on this local sample.
All of the data discussed here are available electronically. The raw and pipeline-processed UIT data frames can be obtained from the Multimission Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The processed image frames and photometry files used in this paper will be deposited in the NASA-Goddard Astronomical Data Center.
We are grateful to Laura Allen, George Becker, Mike Greason, Joan Hollis, Joel Offenberg, and Ronak Shah for assistance with this project and to all of those others who contributed to the success of the Astro-1 and Astro-2 missions. We acknowledge the use of the SkyView facility (http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov) located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and also the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. Funding for the UIT project was provided through the Spacelab Office at NASA Headquarters under project number 440-51. Additional support was provided by NASA grants NAG5-700, NAGW-2596, and NAG5-6403 to the University of Virginia.