We present deep H -band surface photometry and analysis of 40 Local Volume galaxies , a sample primarily composed of dwarf irregulars in the Cen A group , obtained using the IRIS2 detector at the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope .
We probe to a surface brightness of \sim 25 mag arcsec ^ { -2 } , reaching a 40 times lower stellar density than the Two Micron All Sky Survey ( 2MASS ) .
Employing extremely careful and rigorous cleaning techniques to remove contaminating sources , we perform surface photometry on 33 detected galaxies deriving the observed total magnitude , effective surface brightness and best fitting Sérsic parameters .
We make image quality and surface photometry comparisons to 2MASS and VISTA Hemispheric Survey ( VHS ) demonstrating that deep targeted surveys are still the most reliable means of obtaining accurate surface photometry .
We investigate the B - H colours with respect to mass for Local Volume galaxies , finding that the colours of dwarf irregulars are significantly varied , eliminating the possibility of using optical-NIR colour transformations to facilitate comparison to the more widely available optical data sets .
The structure-luminosity relationships are investigated for our ‘ clean ’ sample of dwarf irregulars .
We demonstrate that a significant fraction of the Local Volume dwarf irregular population have underlying structural properties similar to both Local Volume and Virgo Cluster dwarf ellipticals .
Linear regressions to structure-luminosity relationships for the Local Volume galaxies and Virgo Cluster dwarf ellipticals show significant differences in both slope and scatter around the established trend lines , suggesting that environment might regulate the structural scaling relationships of dwarf galaxies in comparison to their more isolated counterparts .