One of the science projects using the reduction pipeline is focused on Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies. In recent years galaxy surveys have shown that our observations are influenced by strong selection effects against surface brightness. In these sample LSB galaxies were mostly missing. This lack of LSB galaxies resulted in the picture predicting a uniform central surface brightness of nearly 21.5 mag arcsec-2 for all disk galaxies. Due to the development of new amplification techniques and the use of more sensitive CCDs it became clear that these selection effects were the result of the less sensitivity of photographic plates. Larger and more sensitive surveys in the last couple of years have shown that LSB galaxies exists in large numbers.

These missing LSBs represent a significant reservoir of baryons in the universe. Depending on the number densities these galaxies could also represent a significant fraction of the dark matter and could therfore play an important role for cosmology.

Studies of small samples of LSB galaxies have shown that they exist over the same parameter space like High Surface Brightness (HSB) galaxies. Our group was able to show that the LSBs have a different location in the color-color space in comparison to HSB galaxies. This different location is a hint for a different stellar population mix and therefor a hint for a different evolution path taken by the LSB galaxies. They represent a parallel population of galaxies. This leads us to the question:

Why do some galaxies evolve to so called normal HSB galaxies and other end up as LSB galaxies?

The understanding of the formation and evolution processes of LSB galaxies could therfore be fundamental for the understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies in universe as a whole.

We plan to derive a significant sample of LSB galaxies due to the use of multicolor wide field observations in order to study the formation and evolution processes of these galaxies. At the moment we start to analyze existing extended deep surveys (e.g. COMBO17, SDDS, NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey) and data from the WFI at the ESO/MPG 2.2m telescope at La Silla.