TITLE:

Deep Near-Infrared Imaging with the Keck Telescope

AUTHOR: Matthew A. Bershady

PUBLISHED: in the proceedings of ``Galaxies in the Young
Universe,'' Springer series ``Lecture Notes in Physics'',
eds. H. Hippelein, K. Meisenheimer, H.-J. Roser, 1996, p. 125

ABSTRACT:

We present first results from a study of faint field galaxies
in deep J and K band images from the Keck Telescope in several
fields at high galactic latitudes. The total area of the
survey is small (~3e-4 deg^2), but reaches depths of K=24 and
J=24.5 for the most compact objects. Compared to other surveys
at comparable depths, we find that the K band differential
counts neither flatten nor steepen beyond K=22, but continue
to rise with a slope of log(A) near 0.3. Based on new,
empirical models of galaxy counts, we find the slope of the
faint end of the K band counts is not sensitive to q0. Our
galaxy count analysis is only the first step in probing the
galaxy distribution at high redshift.