O. Alonso et al., AUTOMATIC SELECTION OF NEW H-ALPHA EMISSION-LINE GALAXIES USING MAMA, Astronomy & Astrophysics. Supplement series, 113(2), 1995, pp. 399-408
A full set of algorithms for the automatic analysis of low-resolution
objective-prism spectra has been developed with the aim of finding new
emission-line galaxies (ELGs) candidates from the Universidad Complut
ense de Madrid (UCM) survey prism plates. An objective-prism plate and
a direct plate, used for pairing objects and to perform star-galaxy s
eparation, have been scanned with the MAMA machine. The plates were ta
ken in the red region of the spectrum, using the H alpha+[NII] blend i
n emission as selection criterion. The procedure, applied to digitized
spectra, is able to automatically select ELGs candidates. Density to
intensity transformation has not been used in our method; the detectio
n of the emission is performed applying three independent criteria ove
r the one-dimensional spectra in raw data. The automatically selected
sample is compared with that obtained after a careful visual scan. Spe
ctroscopic observations at moderate spectral resolution are presented
for the whole sample of candidates in order to study the drawbacks and
the biases of both methods.