Calibrating the fundamental plane with SDSS DR8 data
  We present a calibration of the fundamental plane using SDSS Data Release 8.
We analysed about 93000 elliptical galaxies up to $z<0.2$, the largest sample
used for the calibration of the fundamental plane so far. We incorporated
up-to-date K-corrections and used GalaxyZoo data to classify the galaxies in
our sample. We derived independent fundamental plane fits in all five Sloan
filters u, g, r, i and z. A direct fit using a volume-weighted least-squares
method was applied to obtain the coefficients of the fundamental plane, which
implicitly corrects for the Malmquist bias. We achieved an accuracy of 15% for
the fundamental plane as a distance indicator. We provide a detailed discussion
on the calibrations and their influence on the resulting fits. These
re-calibrated fundamental plane relations form a well-suited anchor for
large-scale peculiar-velocity studies in the nearby universe. In addition to
the fundamental plane, we discuss the redshift distribution of the elliptical
galaxies and their global parameters.
