Chandra Survey of Nearby Highly-Inclined Disk Galaxies I: X-ray
  Measurements of Galactic Coronae
  We present a systematical analysis of the Chandra observations of 53 nearby
highly-inclined (i>60 degree) disk galaxies to study the coronae around them.
This sample covers a broad range of galaxy properties: e.g., about three orders
of magnitude in the SFR and more than two orders of magnitude in the stellar
mass. The Chandra observations of the diffuse soft X-ray emission from 20 of
these galaxies are presented for the first time. The data are reduced in a
uniform manner, including the excision/subtraction of both resolved and
unresolved stellar contributions. Various coronal properties, such as the scale
height and luminosity, are characterized for all the sample galaxies. For
galaxies with high enough counting statistics, we also examine the thermal and
chemical states of the coronal gas. We note on galaxies with distinct
multi-wavelength characteristics which may affect the coronal properties. The
uniformly processed images, spectra, and brightness profiles, as well as the
inferred hot gas parameters, form a large X-ray database for studying the
coronae around nearby disk galaxies. We also discuss various complications
which may cause biases to this database and their possible corrections or
effects, such as the uncertainty in the thermal and chemical states of hot gas,
the different galactic disk inclination angles, the presence of AGN, and the
contribution of the emission from charge exchange at interfaces between hot and
cool gases. Results from a detailed correlation analysis are presented in a
companion paper, to gain a more comprehensive statistical understanding of the
origin of galactic coronae.
