Document Overview

The main text (pp. -) is organized as follows. The current chapter (Chapter ) gives a general introduction to the thesis. Chapter  gives background information necessary for the subsequent chapters. The topics covered include the Fundamental Plane and stellar population synthesis models. Chapter  describes the sample selection and basic reductions for the HydraI photometry. Chapter  describes the HydraI surface photometry and the standard calibration. Chapter  describes the derivation of the global photometric parameters for the HydraI data. Chapter  describes the HydraI spectroscopy. Chapter  starts with a summary of the HydraI data and a presentation of the Coma data. Then the analysis is presented. Finally, in Chapter  the conclusions are given.

The appendices (pp. -) are organized as follows. Appendix  gives details of the basic reductions of the photometry. Appendix  gives details of the surface photometry. Appendix  describes the standard calibration of the photometry. Appendix  lists the Coma data. Appendix  shows images of the 35 fields on the sky in which the galaxies in the HydraI surface photometry sample are located. Finally, Appendix  shows the HydraI surface photometry profiles (e.g. $\mu$, $\varepsilon$ and ${c_{\rm 4}}$ as function of radius).

Readers not interested in the data details can profitably read Chapter , skip Chapter -, and read Chapter -. The data used in the analysis will still be introduced in Sect. .