Automated Morphological Classification of Faint Galaxies

The Muenster Redshift Project (MRSP) analyses large scale structures of galaxies by studying film copies of direct and objective prism Schmidt plates (Seitter et al. 1989). For the digitization of these plates, two Microdensitometers PDS2020GMplus are available. All steps of data reduction on both direct and objective prism platesare performed automatically. From the objective prism plates the galaxy redshifts are determined (Schuecker 1988). The direct plates are used for image segmentation, star-galaxy-separation (Horstmann 1988) and the derivation of various properties characterizing the image. The description of a further step, the automated morphological classification of galaxies, is given here (see Fig. 1).