THE ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL, 470:172-188, 1996 October 10

                       THE LAS CAMPANAS REDSHIFT SURVEY

                   STEPHEN A. SHECTMAN AND STEPHEN D. LANDY
     Carnegie Observatories, 813 Santa Barbara Street, Pasadena, CA 91101;
                         shec@ociw.edu, landy@ociw.edu

                                AUGUSTUS OEMLER
      Department of Astronomy, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8101;
                             oemler@astro.yale.edu

                               DOUGLAS L. TUCKER
          Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16,
                   D-14482 Potsdam, Germany; dtucker@aip.de

                        HUAN LIN AND ROBERT P. KIRSHNER
        Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street,
     Cambridge, MA 02138; hlin@cfa.harvard.edu, kirshner@cfa.harvard.edu

                                      AND

                               PAUL L. SCHECHTER
         Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
                 Cambridge, MA 02139; schech@achernar.mit.edu


                                   ABSTRACT

        The Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS) consists of 26,418
     redshifts of galaxies selected from a CCD-based catalog obtained in
     the R band.  The survey covers over 700 deg^2 in six strips, each
     1.5x80 deg, three each in the north and south Galactic caps.  The
     median redshift in the survey is about 30,000 km/s.  Essential
     features of the galaxy selection and redshift measurement methods are
     described and tabulated here.  These details are important for
     subsequent analysis of the LCRS data.  Two-dimensional representations
     of the redshift distributions reveal many repititions of voids, on the
     scale of about 5000 km/s, sharply bounded by large walls of galaxies
     as seen in nearby surveys.  Statistical investigations of the mean
     galaxy properties and of clustering on the large scale are reported
     elsewhere.  These include studies of the luminosity function, power
     spectrum in two and three dimensions, correlation function, pairwise
     velocity distribution, identification of large-scale structures, and a
     group catalog.  The LCRS redshift catalog will be made available to
     interested investigators at an internet web site and in archival form
     as an AAS CD-ROM.

     Subject headings: cosmology: observations -- galaxies: clusters:
                       general -- galaxies: distances and redshifts --
                       surveys