The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue ( MGC ) is a 37.5 deg ^ { 2 } , medium-deep , B -band imaging survey along the celestial equator , taken with the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope .
The survey region is contained within the regions of both the Two Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey ( 2dFGRS ) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Early Data Release ( SDSS-EDR ) .
The survey has a uniform isophotal detection limit of 26 mag arcsec ^ { -2 } and it provides a robust , well-defined catalogue of stars and galaxies in the range 16 \leq B _ { MGC } < 24 mag .

Here we describe the survey strategy , the photometric and astrometric calibration , source detection and analysis , and present the galaxy number counts that connect the bright and faint galaxy populations within a single survey .
We argue that these counts represent the state of the art and use them to constrain the normalizations ( \phi ^ { * } ) of a number of recent estimates of the local galaxy luminosity function .
We find that the 2dFGRS , SDSS Commissioning Data ( CD ) , ESO Slice Project , Century Survey , Durham/UKST , Mt Stromlo/APM , SSRS2 , and NOG luminosity functions require a revision of their published \phi ^ { * } values by factors of 1.05 \pm 0.05 , 0.76 \pm 0.10 , 1.02 \pm 0.22 , 1.02 \pm 0.16 , 1.16 \pm 0.28 , 1.75 \pm 0.37 , 1.40 \pm 0.26 and 1.01 \pm 0.39 , respectively .
After renormalizing the galaxy luminosity functions we find a mean local b _ { J } luminosity density of \overline { j _ { b _ { J } } } = ( 1.986 \pm 0.031 ) \times 10 ^ { 8 } h L _ { \odot } Mpc ^ { -3 } . We use H _ { 0 } = 100 h km s ^ { -1 } Mpc ^ { -1 } throughout this paper .