Left: absolute magnitude vs. distance of galaxies with mag. The top panel shows the galaxies in the original sample, and the bottom panel shows the galaxies generated in the direction of the Galactic plane. The K_s = 11.25 mag limit is given by the red line. To prevent a bias toward the faint galaxies at small distances, we use a volume-selected sample with maximum distance 100 Mpc corresponding to minimum absolute magnitude M_K = −23.75 (dashed orange lines). Middle: number of galaxies in a volume-limited sample as a function of the maximum distance. Right: luminosity function of the original sample, used to produce the additional sample with the same luminosity distribution.