Author Description

The `Local Volume' (ie, the sphere of radius 10 Mpc centered on the Local Group) is known to contain at least 500 known galaxies, many of which congregate in well-known groups like the Local Group, the relatively loose Sculptor Group, and the more compact Centaurus A group. Accurate distances are now available for the majority of these nearby galaxies, allowing us to visualise the Local Volume in 3D, study the local Hubble flow and its dispersion, the (baryonic) Tully-Fisher relation, the local star formation density, etc. Individual galaxies in the Local Volume can be studied in amazing detail across a large range of wavelengths (some stunning examples are compiled in the Multiwavelength Astronomy pages). The first catalog of galaxies within 10 Mpc was compiled by Kraan-Korteweg & Tammann (1979); it contained 179 galaxies. Following numerous updates, the latest `Catalog of Neighboring Galaxies' was presented by Karachentsev et al. (2004); it contains 451 galaxies. They find that about 85% of the LV population are dwarf galaxies which contribute approx. 4% to the local optical luminosity density and roughly 10-15% to the local HI mass density. For the majority of galaxies within 8 Mpc we currently have quite reliable, independent distance estimates either from the luminosity of Cepheids, the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB), or surface brightness fluctuations (SBF). Several large surveys of nearby galaxies have recently been carried out or are in progress. E.g., `The Westerbork observations of neutral Hydrogen in Irregular and SPiral galaxies' (WHISP, Swaters et al. 2002), which is based on the Uppsala General Catalogue of Galaxies (UGC; Nielson 1973), provides HI distributions and velocity fields of about 200 gas-rich galaxies with declinations larger than +20 degrees and velocities less than 2000 km/s. This is complemented by `The Ha Galaxy Survey' (HaGS; James et al. 2004), also based on the UGC, which provides star formation parameters for a l