The Halos and Environments of Nearby Galaxies (HERON) Survey
  We have used dedicated 0.7m telescopes in California and Israel to image the
halos of ~200 galaxies in the Local Volume to 29 mag/sq arcsec, the sample
mainly drawn from the 2MASS Large Galaxy Atlas (LGA). We supplement the LGA
sample with dwarf galaxies and more distant giant ellipticals. Low surface
brightness halos exceeding 50 kpc in diameter are found only in galaxies more
luminous than L* and classic interaction signatures are relatively infrequent.
Halo diameter is correlated with total galaxy luminosity. Extended low surface
brightness halos are present even in galaxies as faint as M_V=-18. Edge-on
galaxies with boxy bulges tend to lack extended spheroidal halos, while those
with large classical bulges exhibit extended round halos, supporting the
notions that boxy or barlike bulges originate from disks. Most face-on spiral
galaxies present features that appear to be irregular extensions of spiral
arms, although rare cases show smooth boundaries with no sign of star
formation. Although we serendipitously discovered a dwarf galaxy undergoing
tidal disruption in the halo of NGC 4449, we found no comparable examples in
our general survey. A search for similar examples in the Local Volume
identified hcc087, a tidally disrupting dwarf galaxy in the Hercules Cluster,
but we do not confirm an anomalously large half-light radius reported for the
dwarf VCC 1661.
