The galaxy counts-in-cells distribution from the SDSS
  We determine the galaxy counts-in-cells distribution from the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey (SDSS) for 3D spherical cells in redshift space as well as for 2D
projected cells. We find that cosmic variance in the SDSS causes the
counts-in-cells distributions in different quadrants to differ from each other
by up to 20%. We also find that within this cosmic variance, the overall galaxy
counts-in-cells distribution agrees with both the gravitational
quasi-equilibrium distribution and the negative binomial distribution. We also
find that brighter galaxies are more strongly clustered than if they were
randomly selected from a larger complete sample that includes galaxies of all
luminosities. The results suggest that bright galaxies could be in dark matter
haloes separated by less than ~10 Mpc/h.
