In astronomy, surface brightness quantifies the apparent brightness or flux density per unit angular area of a spatially extended object such as a galaxy or nebula, or of the night sky background.
 An object's surface brightness depends on its surface luminosity density, i.e., its luminosity emitted per unit surface area.
 In visible and infrared astronomy, surface brightness is often quoted on a magnitude scale, in magnitudes per square arcsecond in a particular filter band or photometric system.
The Tolman surface brightness test is one out of a half-dozen cosmological tests that was conceived in the 1930s to check the viability of and compare new cosmological models. Tolman's test compares the surface brightness of galaxies as a function of their redshift (measured as "z").
 Such a comparison was first proposed in 1930 by Richard C. Tolman as a test of whether the universe is expanding or static.
 Different physicists have claimed that the results support different models.
NGC 4395 is a low surface brightness spiral galaxy with a halo that is about 8′ in diameter.
 It has several wide areas of greater brightness running northwest to southeast.
 The one furthest southeast is the brightest.
 Three of the patches have their own NGC numbers: 4401, 4400, and 4399 running east to west.
Richard Chace Tolman (March 4, 1881 – September 5, 1948) was an American mathematical physicist and physical chemist who was an authority on statistical mechanics.
 He also made important contributions to theoretical cosmology in the years soon after Einstein's discovery of general relativity.
 He was a professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Malin 1 is a giant low surface brightness (LSB) spiral galaxy, the prototype of LSB galaxies.
 It is located 366 Mpc away in the constellation Coma Berenices, near the North Galactic Pole.
 s of 2015 it is the largest known spiral galaxy so far discovered, with an approximate diameter of 650000 ly , six and a half times the diameter of our Milky Way.
 It was discovered by astronomer David Malin in 1986 and is the first LSB galaxy verified to exist.
 As such, it is also the first giant LSB galaxy discovered.
 Its high surface brightness central spiral is 30000 ly across, with a bulge of 10000 ly .
 The central spiral is a SB0a type barred-spiral.
Christopher David Impey (born 25 January 1956) is a British astronomer, educator, and author.
 He has been a faculty member at the University of Arizona since 1986.
 Impey has done research on observational cosmology, in particular low surface brightness galaxies, the intergalactic medium, and surveys of active galaxies and quasars.
 As an educator, he has pioneered the use of instructional technology for teaching science to undergraduate non-science majors.
 He has written many technical articles and a series of popular science books: "The Living Cosmos", "", "How It Began", "Dreams of Other Worlds", and "Humble Before the Void".
 He served as Vice-President of the American Astronomical Society, he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.
The fundamental plane is a set of bivariate correlations connecting some of the properties of normal elliptical galaxies, including their radius, luminosity, mass, velocity dispersion, metallicity, surface brightness, colors, density (of luminosity, mass, or phase space), and, to a lesser degree, the shape of their radial surface brightness profiles.
 It is usually expressed as a relationship between the effective radius, average surface brightness and central velocity dispersion of normal elliptical galaxies.
 Any one of the three parameters may be estimated from the other two, as together they describe a plane that falls within their more general three-dimensional space.
Andromeda IX (And 9) is a dwarf spheroidal satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy.
 It was discovered in 2004 by resolved stellar photometry from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), by Zucker et al. (2004).
 At the time of its discovery, it was the galaxy with the lowest known surface brightness, Σ ≃ 26.8mags arcsec and the faintest galaxy known from its intrinsic absolute brightness.
Stacy McGaugh (born January 11, 1964) is an American astronomer and professor in the Department of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
 His fields of specialty include low surface brightness galaxies, galaxy formation and evolution, tests of dark matter and alternative hypotheses, and measurements of cosmological parameters.
Surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) is a secondary distance indicator used to estimate distances to galaxies.
 It is useful to 100 Mpc (parsec).
 The method measures the variance in a galaxy's light distribution arising from fluctuations in the numbers of and luminosities of individual stars per resolution element.
 The technique uses the fact that galaxies are made up of a finite number of stars.
 The number of stars in any small patch of a galaxy will vary from point to point, creating a noise-like fluctuation in its surface brightness.
 While the various stars present in a galaxy will cover an enormous range of luminosity, the SBF can be characterized as having an average brightness.
 A galaxy twice as far away appears twice as smooth as a result of the averaging.
 Older elliptical galaxies have fairly consistent stellar populations, thus it closely approximates a standard candle.
 In practice, corrections are required to account for variations in age or metallicity from galaxy to galaxy.
 Calibration of the method is made empirically from Cepheids or theoretically from stellar population models.

Question: Where was the creator of the The Tolman surface brightness test a professor at?
Answer: the California Institute of Technology