• DOI:10.1086/432466
• Corpus ID: 18125716

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey View of the Palomar-Green Bright Quasar Survey

@article{Jester2005TheSD,
  title={The Sloan Digital Sky Survey View of the Palomar-Green Bright Quasar Survey},
  author={Sebastian Jester and Donald P. Schneider and Gordon T. Richards and Richard Green and Maarten Schmidt and Patrick B. Hall and Michael A. Strauss and Daniel E. vanden Berk and Chris Stoughton and James E. Gunn and Jonathan V. Brinkmann and Stephen Matthew Kent and J. Allyn Smith and Douglas L. Tucker and Brian Yanny Fermilab and Penn State and Princeton and Kpno and Caltech and University of York and Apache Point Obs. and University of Chicago and University of Wyoming and Lanl},
  journal={The Astronomical Journal},
  year={2005},
  volume={130},
  pages={873-895}
}

• S. Jester, D. Schneider, +21 authors Lanl
• Published 1 February 2005
• Physics
• The Astronomical Journal

We investigate the extent to which the Palomar-Green (PG) Bright Quasar Survey (BQS) is complete and representative of the general quasar population by comparing it with imaging and spectroscopy from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). A comparison of SDSS and PG photometry of both stars and quasars reveals the need to apply a color and magnitude recalibration to the PG data. Using the SDSS photometric catalog, we define the PG's parent sample of objects that are not main-sequence stars and simulate the selection of objects from this parent sample using the PG photometric criteria and errors. This simulation shows that the effective U - B cut in the PG survey is U - B 0.5 are inherently rare in bright surveys in any case). We find no evidence for any other systematic incompleteness when comparing the distributions in color, redshift, and FIRST radio properties of the BQS and a BQS-like subsample of the SDSS quasar sample. However, the application of a bright magnitude limit biases the BQS toward the inclusion of objects that are blue in g - i, in particular compared to the full range of g - i colors found among the i-band limited SDSS quasars, and even at i-band magnitudes comparable to those of the BQS objects.