@article {28096, title = {Higher Order Moments of the Angular Distribution of Galaxies from Early Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data}, journal = {The Astrophysical Journal}, volume = {570}, year = {2002}, note = {n/a}, month = {May 1, 2002}, pages = {75-85}, abstract = {We present initial results for counts in cell statistics of the angulardistribution of galaxies in early data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey(SDSS). We analyze a rectangular stripe 2.5d wide, coveringapproximately 160 deg2, containing over 106galaxies in the apparent magnitude range 18{\textquoteright}\<22, withareas of bad seeing, contamination from bright stars, ghosts, and highgalactic extinction masked out. This survey region, which forms part ofthe SDSS early data release, is the same as that for which two-pointangular clustering statistics have recently been computed. The third andfourth moments of the cell counts, s3 (skewness) ands4 (kurtosis), constitute the most accurate measurements todate of these quantities (for r{\textquoteright}\<21) over angular scales0.015d-0.3d. They display the approximate hierarchical scaling expectedfrom nonlinear structure formation models and are in reasonableagreement with the predictions of Λ-dominated cold dark mattermodels with galaxy biasing that suppresses higher order correlations atsmall scales. The results are, in general, consistent with previousmeasurements in the APM, EDSGC, and Deeprange surveys. These resultssuggest that the SDSS imaging data are free of systematics to a highdegree and will therefore enable determination of the skewness and }, url = {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002ApJ...570...75S}, author = {Szapudi, Istv{\'a}n and Frieman, Joshua A. and Scoccimarro, Roman and Szalay, Alexander S. and Connolly, Andrew J. and Dodelson, Scott and Eisenstein, Daniel J. and Gunn, James E. and Johnston, David and Kent, Stephen and Loveday, Jon and Meiksin, Avery and Nichol, Robert C. and Scranton, Ryan and Stebbins, Albert and Vogeley, Michael S. and Annis, James and Bahcall, Neta A. and Brinkman, J. and Csabai, Istv{\'a}n and Doi, Mamoru and Fukugita, Masataka and Ivezi{\'c}, {\v Z}eljko and Kim, Rita S. J. and Knapp, Gillian R. and Lamb, Don Q. and Lee, Brian C. and Lupton, Robert H. and McKay, Timothy A. and Munn, Jeff and Peoples, John and Pier, Jeff and Rockosi, Constance and Schlegel, David and Stoughton, Christopher and Tucker, Douglas L. and Yanny, Brian and York, Douglas G.} }