An Extremely Deep Wide-Field Near-Infrared Survey: Bright Galaxy Counts
  and Local Large Scale Structure
  We present a deep, wide-field near-infrared (NIR) survey over five widely
separated fields at high Galactic latitude covering a total of ~ 3 deg^2 in J,
H, and Ks. The deepest areas of the data (~ 0.25 deg^2) extend to a 5 sigma
limiting magnitude of JHKs > 24 in the AB magnitude system. Although depth and
area vary from field to field, the overall depth and large area of this dataset
make it one of the deepest wide-field NIR imaging surveys to date. This paper
discusses the observations, data reduction, and bright galaxy counts in these
fields. We compare the slope of the bright galaxy counts with the Two Micron
All Sky Survey (2MASS) and other counts from the literature and explore the
relationship between slope and supergalactic latitude. The slope near the
supergalactic equator is sub- Euclidean on average pointing to the possibility
of a decreasing average space density of galaxies by ~ 10-15% over scales of ~
250-350 Mpc. On the contrary, the slope at high supergalactic latitudes is
strongly super-Euclidean on average suggesting an increase in the space density
of galaxies as one moves from the voids just above and below the supergalactic
plane out to distances of ~ 250-350 Mpc. These results suggest that local large
scale structure could be responsible for large discrepancies in the measured
slope between different studies in the past. In addition, the local universe
away from the supergalactic plane appears to be underdense by ~ 25-100%
relative to the space densities of a few hundred megaparsecs distant. Subject
headings: cosmology: observations and large scale structure of
universe-galaxies: fundamental parameters (counts)-infrared: galaxies
