Spectroscopy of Outlying H II Regions in Spiral Galaxies: Abundances and Radial Gradients

Abstract

We present the results of low dispersion optical spectroscopy of 186 H II regions spanning a range of radius in 13 spiral galaxies. Abundances for several elements (oxygen, nitrogen, neon, sulfur, and argon) were determined for 185 of the H II regions. As expected, low metallicities were found for the outlying H II regions of these spiral galaxies. Radial abundance gradients were derived for the 11 primary galaxies; similar to results for other spiral galaxies, the derived abundance gradients are typically -0.04 to -0.07 dex/kpc.

18 pages of text, 20 pages of tables, 15 pages of figures. Tables 3-5 are also available as ascii text in the tar file. Accepted to the AJ