Optical spectrophotometry of SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) covering the first 5 months since outburst is presented. More than 80 spectra were obtained at Cerro Tololo over this period, mostly with the "2D-Frutti" two-dimensional photon-counting detector on the 1 m telescope. The spectrophotometric calibration of the 2D-Frutti data is considered in detail. Through a comparison with broadband photometry, we show that the accuracy of the 2D-Frutti spectrophotometry is +/- 5% in absolute terms, and that the relative calibration for any single spectrum is accurate to +/- 3%. CCD spectrophotometry obtained on the first night of observation (25 February 1987) is also briefly discussed. Radial velocities for several prominent absorption and emission features are measured from these combined data.
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Phillips et al. (1988) studied this question.