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Description
The ESO Slice Project (ESP) is a galaxy redshift survey in a region near the South Galactic Pole (see Vettolani et al., 1997A&A...325..954V; Zucca et al., 1997A&A...326..477Z). It extends over a strip 22(RA)x1(DEC) square degrees, plus a nearby area of 5x1 square degrees, 5 degrees west of the main strip. The right ascension limits are 22h30m and 01h20m, at a mean declination of -40{deg}15' (B1950). We have covered this region with a regular grid of adjacent circular fields, with a diameter of 32arcmin each, corresponding to the field of view of the multifiber spectrograph OPTOPUS at the 3.6m ESO telescope. The total solid angle of the spectroscopic survey is 23.2 square degrees. The galaxy catalogue has been extracted from the Edinburgh-Durham Southern Galaxy catalogue (Heydon-Dumbleton et al., 1989MNRAS.238..379H) which has been obtained from COSMOS (MacGillivray & Stobie, 1984VA.....27..433M) scans of SERC J survey plates. The number of objects in the photometric ESP sample is 4487. The spectroscopic survey is about 85% complete to the limiting magnitude bJ=19.4, and consists of 3342 galaxies + 1 QSO with redshift determination. The ESP survey is intermediate between shallow, wide angle samples and very deep, one--dimensional pencil beams. Table 2 lists the fields observed with OPTOPUS and their properties: the numbers listed in this table can be used to compute the redshift completeness of each fields, following eq.(2) of the paper. Table 3 provides the catalogue, with galaxies sorted in right ascension. The catalogue with additional information and updates can also be found at the following URL: http://boas5.bo.astro.it/~cappi/esokp.html
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