We determine the morphological types of 2295 galaxies from the ESO Nearby Abell Cluster Survey ( ENACS ) from CCD images obtained with the Dutch telescope on La Silla .
A comparison with morphological types from the literature for 450 of our galaxies shows that the reliability of our classification is quite comparable to that of other classifiers .
We recalibrate the ENACS spectral classification with the new morphological types , and find that early- and late-type galaxies can be distinguished from their spectra with 83 % reliability .
Ellipticals and S0 galaxies can hardly be distinguished on the basis of their spectra , but late spirals can be classified from the spectrum alone with more than 70 % reliability . We derive pseudo-colors and linestrengths from the ENACS spectra for the galaxies of different morphological types .
We consider the bright ( M _ { R } \leq - 20 ) and faint ( M _ { R } > -20 ) subsets of the galaxies without emission lines ( non-ELG ) separately .
We find a strong and significant correlation between the average color and the average strength of the metal absorption lines .
The average metallicity decreases and the average color gets bluer towards later Hubble type .
Also , the faint galaxies in each morphological class are bluer and less metal-rich than their brighter counterparts , which extends the well-established color-magnitude relation of early-type galaxies to ( late ) spirals .
In view of these very strong global trends , the colors and metallicities of faint S0 galaxies and bright early spirals are remarkably similar .
The bright early spirals may , on average , have somewhat stronger H \delta absorption than the other galaxies , which could be due to recent starformation . The galaxies with emission lines ( ELG ) have a bluer spectral continuum than the non-ELG , and the amount of blueing hardly depends on morphological type .
The fraction of ELG depends strongly on morphological type ( varying from 4 \pm 1 % for ellipticals to 59 \pm 4 % for late spirals ) , but for each of the morphological types it varies very little with projected distance from the cluster center .
alaxies : clusters : general - Galaxies : fundamental parameters - Galaxies : statistics