Abstract

We present a new maximum likelihood method for the calculation of galaxy luminosity functions (LFs) from multiband photometric surveys without spectroscopic data. The method evaluates the likelihood of a trial LF by directly comparing the predicted distribution of fluxes in a multidimensional photometric space to the observations, and thus does not require the intermediate step of calculating photometric redshifts. We apply this algorithm to ~27 000 galaxies with m R = 25 in MUSYC-ECDFS, with a focus on recovering the LF of field galaxies at z < 1.2. Our deepest LFs reach M r ˜ -14 and show that the field galaxy LF deviates from a Schechter function, exhibiting a steep upturn at intermediate magnitudes that is due to galaxies of late spectral types. © 2009 RAS.