WINGS: Deep optical phot. of 77 nearby clusters

Photometry has been performed on images in which large galaxies and halos of bright stars were removed after modeling them with elliptical isophotes. We publish deep optical photometric catalogs (90% complete at V21.7, which translates to ~ MV* + 6 at mean redshift), giving positions, geometrical parameters, and several total and aperture magnitudes for all the objects detected. For each field we have produced three catalogs containing galaxies, stars and objects of "unknown" classification (~16%).

From simulations we found that the uncertainty of our photometry is quite dependent of the light profile of the objects with stars having the most robust photometry and de Vaucouleurs profiles showing higher uncertainties and also an additional bias of ~-0.2m. The star/galaxy classification of the bright objects (V<20) was checked visually making negligible the fraction of misclassified objects. For fainter objects, we found that simulations do not provide reliable estimates of the possible misclassification and therefore we have compared our data with that from deep counts of galaxies and star counts from models of our Galaxy.

Both sets turned out to be consistent with our data within ~5% (in the ratio galaxies/total) up to V~24. Finally, we remark that the application of our special procedure to remove large halos improves the photometry of the large galaxies in our sample with respect to the use of blind automatic procedures and increases (~16%) the detection rate of objects projected onto them.