The Southern Sky Redshift Survey

We report redshifts, magnitudes, and morphological classifications for 5369 galaxies with m B ≤ 15.5 and for 57 galaxies fainter than this limit, in two regions covering a total of 1.70 sr in the southern celestial hemisphere. The galaxy catalog is drawn primarily from the list of nonstellar objects identified in the Hubble Space T elescope Guide Star Catalog (GSC). The galaxies have positions accurate to ∼1'' and magnitudes with an rms scatter of ∼0.3 mag. We compute magnitudes ( m SSRS2 ) from the relation between instrumental GSC magnitudes and the photometry by Lauberts & Valentijn. From a comparison with CCD photometry, we find that our system is homogeneous across the sky and corresponds to magnitudes measured at the isophotal level ∼26 mag arcsec -2 . The precision of the radial velocities is ∼40 km s -1 , and the redshift survey is more than 99% complete to the m SSRS2 = 15.5 mag limit. This sample is in the direction opposite that of the CfA2; in combination the two surveys provide an important database for studies of the properties of galaxies and their large-scale distribution in the nearby universe.