SDSS DR7 groups of galaxies

Volume-limited catalogues are particularly useful for comparison of numerical simulations of dark matter halos and the large-scale structure with observations. Extraction of a volume-limited sample of galaxies and groups requires special care to avoid excluding too much observational data.

We use a modified friends-of-friends (FoF) method with a slightly variable linking length to obtain a preliminary flux-limited sample. We use the flux-limited groups as the basic sample to include as many galaxies as possible in the volume-limited samples. To determine the scaling of the linking length we calibrated group sizes and mean galaxy number densities within groups by magnitude dilution of a nearby group sub-sample to follow the properties of groups with higher luminosity limits.