Inclinations and Position Angles for Disc Galaxies in the SGA sample
Abstract
We present a data-driven method for determining the inclination and position angle (PA) of disc galaxies using a Fourier-Laguerre basis decomposition of imaging data. We define a dimensionless metric, , that characterises the ratio of the quadrupole and monopole coefficients in the Fourier-Laguerre basis function expansion. This metric serves as a robust measure which is related to the inclination of a galaxy. We find an empirical relationship between and inclination which is agnostic to the galaxy morphology. The PA is derived directly from the phase of the quadrupolar Fourier-Laguerre functions. Across a benchmark sample of galaxies, the method reproduces published inclination and PA values to within a median of 10 and 5, respectively, while also demonstrating essentially zero catastrophic failures. Applying this pipeline to galaxies from the Siena Galaxy Atlas (SGA), we report measurements of , scale length and PA for three different bands of 133,942 disc galaxies. Our computationally inexpensive technique automates parametrisation analysis and returns reproducible results for large surveys. We release a Python package ready for application to next generation surveys.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.19207,
title = {Inclinations and Position Angles for Disc Galaxies in the SGA sample},
author = {Megan H. Martinez and Michael S. Petersen and Carrie Filion and Rashid Yaaqib and Claire Larson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.19207},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
12 pages, 9 figures