The photometric properties of brightest cluster galaxies. I - Absolute magnitudes in 116 nearby Abell clusters

Two-color aperture photometry of the brightest galaxies in a complete sample of nearby Abell clusters is presented. The results are used to anchor the bright end of the Hubble diagram; essentially the entire formal error for this method is then due to the sample of distant clusters used. New determinations of the systematic trend of galaxy absolute magnitude with the cluster properties of richness and Bautz-Morgan type are derived. When these new results are combined with the Gunn and Oke (1975) data on high-redshift clusters, a formal value (without accounting for any evolution) of q sub 0 = -0.55 + or - 0.45 (1 standard deviations) is found.