Merging galaxies in isolated environments I. Multiband photometry,
  classification, stellar masses, and star formation rates
  Extragalactic surveys provide significant statistical data for the study of
crucial galaxy parameters used to constrain galaxy evolution, e.g. stellar mass
(M$_*$) and star formation rate (SFR), under different environmental
conditions. These quantities are derived using manual or automatic methods for
galaxy detection and flux measurement in imaging data at different wavelengths.
The reliability of these automatic measurements, however, is subject to
mis-identification and poor fitting due to the morphological irregularities
present in resolved nearby galaxies (e.g. clumps, tidal disturbances,
star-forming regions) and its environment (galaxies in overlap). Our aim is to
provide accurate multi-wavelength photometry (from the UV to the IR, including
GALEX, SDSS, and WISE) in a sample of $\sim$ 600 nearby (z<0.1) isolated
mergers, as well as estimations of M$_*$ and SFR. We performed photometry
following a semi-automated approach using SExtractor, confirming by visual
inspection that we successfully extracted the light from the entire galaxy,
including tidal tails and star-forming regions. We used the available SED
fitting code MAGPHYS in order to estimate M$_*$ and SFR. We provide the first
catalogue of isolated merging galaxies of galaxy mergers including
aperture-corrected photometry in 11 bands (FUV, NUV, u, g, r, i, z, W1, W2, W3,
and W4), morphological classification, merging stage, M$_*$, and SFR. We found
that SFR and M$_*$ derived from automated catalogues can be wrong by up to
three orders of magnitude as a result of incorrect photometry. Contrary to
previous methods, our semi-automated method can reliably extract the flux of a
merging system completely. Even when the SED fitting often smooths out some of
the differences in the photometry, caution using automatic photometry is
suggested as these measurements can lead to large differences in M$_*$ and SFR
estimations.
