The Indus Supercluster

A survey of rich galaxy clusters, redshifts for many of those clusters, and galaxy counts by eye to B = 19.0 show the Indus Supercluster to be an annular (in projection) configuration of nine rich clusters at 0.073 <approx. z <approx. 0.080 apparently connected by bridges of galaxies. Photoelectrically calibrated photographic photometry of galaxy images on six U.K. Schmidt plates using the COSMOS machine at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, gave photometric information for about 150,000 galaxies. From this, the luminosity function of the Indus Supercluster was extracted. To B = 21.5, the Supercluster includes about 25,000 galaxies, its estimated total luminosity is 7 x 1013 times that of the sun, and its total mass, 1 x 1016 solar masses. Its diameter is about 40 Mpc. In addition, the integrated apparent field luminosity function for galaxies, derived from the 140 square degrees of sky scanned on Schmidt plates by COSMOS, agrees with most previous determinations. (author)