The Nearby Field Galaxy Survey: a spectrophotometric and photometric study of nearby galaxies

We report on our observing program to obtain integrated spectrophotometry, intermediate and high resolution major axis spectra, and U,B,R surface photo- metry of a representative sample of ~200 galaxies in the nearby field. The main goal of this program is to provide a comparison sample for high redshift studies and to study the variation in star formation rates (SFR), star forma- tion history (SFH), excitation, metallicity, and internal kinematics over a large range in galaxy luminosity and morphological type. In particular, we extend the work of Kennicutt (1992) to lower luminosity systems. We present the main results of our analysis sofar. In these proceedings, we condense the presented two atlases of (1) images and radial surface brightness profiles and color profiles, and (2) of images and integrated spectra into several example images, profiles and spectra, showing the general trends observed. For the original atlasses we refer to the electronic version, available at http://www.astro.rug.nl/~nfgs/ .