1.4. Goals of our HST Mid-UV Imaging Survey

In this section we briefly summarize the main science goals of our project, which determine the size and properties of our WFPC2 mid-UV sample. We aim to:

(1) provide local benchmark images that we can artificially redshift to z 1-3 for quantitative comparison to the morphology and photometric properties of high redshift galaxies;

(2) consistently classify polychromatic structures within galaxies from 0.2-2 with artificial neural networks.

(3) map the spatial distribution, luminosities, and sizes of star-forming regions dominating the UV morphology, and relate these to global galaxy properties;

(4) map the effects of dust at mid-UV wavelengths in galaxies as a function of type, inclination, and galactocentric radius;

In the present paper, we present the benchmark mid-UV images and a qualitative discussion of our results in the context of these science goals. More quantitative studies will be presented in subsequent papers by members of our mid-UV team.

This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we outline our survey strategy, describe the sample selection and discuss the WFPC2 observations. We also discuss the data processing and calibration. Our WFPC2 mid-UV and ground-based optical images are presented in Section 3 , where we also discuss individual objects. We describe the general trends in galaxy morphology as observed from the mid-UV through the optical in Section 4. And in Section 5, we present our main conclusions from this data set.