The Galaxy Counts-in-cells Distribution from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We determine the galaxy counts-in-cells distribution from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) for three-dimensional spherical cells in redshift space as well as for two-dimensional 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 halos separated by less than ~10 h --1 Mpc.