THE HAWAII K-BAND GALAXY SURVEY .2. BRIGHT K-BAND IMAGING

We present the results of a wide-held K-selected galaxy survey with co mplementary optical I- and B-band imaging in six fields with a total c overage of 9.8 deg(2). The observations were carried out on the Univer sity of Hawaii 0.6 m and 2.2 m telescopes. The purpose of this survey is to study the properties of the local galaxies and explore the evolu tion of K-selected galaxies at low redshifts. Star-galaxy discriminati on is performed using both galaxy color properties and object morpholo gies, and 6264 galaxies are found. This survey establishes the bright- end K-band galaxy number counts in the magnitude range 13 < K < 16 wit h high precision. We find that our bright-end counts have a significan tly steeper slope than the prediction of a no-evolution model, which c annot be accounted for by known observational or theoretical error. We argue also against the likelihood of sufficient evolution at such low redshifts to account for this effect; we describe an alternative pict ure in which there is a local deficiency of galaxies by a factor of 2 on scale sizes of around 300 h(-1) Mpc. Taken at face value, this woul d imply that local measurements of Omega(0) underestimate the true val ue of the cosmological mass density by this factor and that local meas urements of H-0 could be high by as much as 33%.