4.3. Treatment of Virgo

To simplify the analysis, we have taken the small-scale velocity noise, _v, to be independent of position. Clearly, this assumption must fail in the immediate vicinity of a rich cluster. The Virgo Cluster is the only rich cluster within 3000 km s^-1. Thus, we must artificially "cool down" the galaxies near Virgo. We do so as follows: if a galaxy lies within 10° of the Virgo core (taken to be l = 283.78°, b = 74.49°) on the sky, within 1500 km s^-1 of its mean Local Group redshift (taken to be 1035.1 km s^-1, following Huchra 1985), and has a raw TF distance from Willick et al. (1997) between 800 and 2100 km s^-1, its Local Group redshift is set to the mean Virgo value. Twenty objects used in the VELMOD analysis meet these criteria. We similarly collapsed mock Mark III objects associated with the Virgo Cluster in the mock catalogs.