Seeking the local convergence depth. V. Tully-Fisher peculiar velocities for 52 Abell clusters

Abstract

We have obtained I-band Tully-Fisher (T-F) measurements for 522 late-type galaxies in the fields of 52 rich Abell clusters distributed throughout the sky between similar to 50 and 200 h(-1) Mpc. Here we estimate corrections to the data for various forms of observational bias, most notably Malmquist and cluster population incompleteness bias. The bias-corrected data are applied to the construction of an I-band T-F template, resulting in a relation with a dispersion of 0.38 mag and a kinematic zero point accurate to 0.02 mag. This represents the most accurate T-F template relation currently available. Individual cluster T-F relations are referred to the average template relation to compute cluster peculiar motions. The line-of-sight dispersion in the peculiar motions is 341 +/- 93 km s(-1), in general agreement with that found for the cluster sample of Giovanelli and coworkers.