general: Your reader might benefit from the addition of a new figure: an image of one galaxy at a single wavelength, graphically illustrating the placing of the photometry and sky apertures. One with modest cirrus might be a good choice, as it would illustrate why the human choice of low-foreground regions improves the accuracy of the results. *** Done general: Your reader might benefit from the addition of a new table: one that lists the values (i.e., gamma, q_pah, U_min, and M_D) derived from the fitting to the Draine et al. models. *** An excellent suggestion. But that is reserved for Gonzalo's paper. author list: Ed Montiel should be added to the author list. He's the one who actually did all the processing of the SPIRE data for KINGFISH, at least of the later versions (basically, every reduction after Joannah's initial reduction of the early data). *** Done tab. 1: Not all these galaxies are in Dale et al. 2007. Some are in your 2009 (LVL) paper, while a couple (IC 342 and NGC 2146) are in neither SINGS nor LVL. The caption might be more complete by citing both your 2007 and 2009 papers, with a footnote describing where the IC 342 and NGC 2146 photometry came from. *** Fixed. When you say "photometry" for Table 1, you must mean TIR. tab. 2: Your tablenote "a" doesn't appear in the table anywhere. The HRS galaxies are NGC4254, NGC4321, NGC4536, NGC4569, NGC4579, and NGC4725. If you're curious, one way to tell in the data is the "OBSERVER" keyword, which is "rkennicu" for KINGFISH and "seales01" for HRS. *** Fixed tab. 2: Why no SPIRE upper limits (or even a detection? it looks like it might be there at 250um) for NGC0584? *** I have done the SPIRE photometry, but for dumb technical reasons I decided to keep those out of the current table. And partly it's because I'm waiting to see the PACS images in order to see if I havd the proper aperture, galaxy masking, etc. figs. 2, 5: Similar to the comments on Table 1, not all the galaxies in KINGFISH appear in Moustakas et al. (2010). If you used other galaxies, too, the reader will likely want to know where the rest of metallicities came from, and can probably be directed to Daniela's 2010 paper (except for M101, which presumably could just be skipped for this plot). *** Fixed figs. 4-6: The caption ought to say what the dashed line is - it looks like it was just drawn at a value of 1. *** Done sec. 3.2: The data suggest somewhat better sensitivities than you list here. This is what I sent to Rob for the overview paper: The per-pixel sensitivities we achieve in our data are described as follows: The average sigmas of a Gaussian fit to the histogram of background values in our 10 faintest galaxies are [0.7,0.4,0.2] +/- [0.09,0.03,0.02] MJy/sr at [250,350,500] microns. These can be compared to values of [1,0.6,0.4] in the text. Admittedly, a small part of the improvement is due to the noise being slightly correlated in the HIPE output, but the smaller values are perhaps a better reflection of what we observe in our data. *** I've updated the text to be consistent with Kennicutt et al. 2011. sec. 3.3: You may want to add "above the atmosphere" after "emission from the sky" to make it clear that your statement only applies to space observatories. *** Done sec. 3.3: It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the background measurement techniques used by you and Gonzalo differ more when the background is high (typically, where there's lots of cirrus), than when it is low. Put another way, the ratio between your background and his may depend on background level. sec. 3.4: I find the treatment of background galaxies in the aperture photometry is not clear. Statements like "background galaxies... are included in the sky apertures" (from sec. 3.3) suggest that background galaxies are ignored, but statements like "background galaxies... would contribute significantly... if not removed" suggest they are identified and removed. Maybe rewording would make this procedure clearer? *** Good point; the wording was indeed unclear. I've clarified the discussion. sec. 4.5: It may be worth pointing out that Ramin's paper (Skibba et al. 2011) does exactly what you describe (fitting modified blackbodies to galaxy SEDs, using a fixed emissivity), for KINGFISH galaxies. He points out in there that more detailed dust models will be fit to the KINGFISH photometry, and that his results should not be taken as the official KINGFISH dust masses. *** Done sec. 4.5: How certain are you that your proposed explanation for the discrepancy between Draine et al. and single-temperature blackbody dust masses (i.e., that primarily the mass of warm dust is the reason) is the correct one? I'm sure I've been told many times (although I can't point you to a reference at the moment) that most of the dust mass lies in the cold component, so my (admittedly crude) intuition would be that, all other things being equal, the Draine et al. and single-temperature blackbody dust masses would be similar. Put another way, how much dust mass resides in the high-temperature component of the Draine fit, compared to the colder component covered by the blackbody fit? Is it close to the factor 1.7 you mention? *** The two methods do produce roughly equal dust masses. I've reworded the text a bit to try and give a compelling reason for the remaining discrepancy: "single-temperature blackbody fits overestimate the dust temperature, thus underestimating the dust mass. The single-temperature model does not account for the contribution of warm dust emitting at shorter wavelengths and the temperatures are driven towards higher values in the attempt to fit both the short and long wavelength far-infrared emission."