Extragalactic large-scale structures behind the southern Milky Way^*

IV. Redshifts obtained with MEFOS

¹ Department of Astronomy, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa
² Depto. de Astronomía, Universidad de Guanajuato, Apartado Postal 144, Guanajuato, Gto 36000, Mexico
³ Obs. de Paris, GEPI, CNRS and Université Paris 7, 5 place Jules Janssen, 92195 Meudon Cedex, France
⁴ Obs. de Paris, LUTH, CNRS and Université Paris 7, 5 place Jules Janssen, 92195 Meudon Cedex, France

Corresponding author: P. A. Woudt, pwoudt@circinus.ast.uct.ac.za

Received: 24 June 2003
Accepted: 7 November 2003

Abstract

As part of our efforts to unveil extragalactic large-scale structures behind the southern Milky Way, we here present redshifts for 764 galaxies in the Hydra/Antlia, Crux and Great Attractor region (, ), obtained with the Meudon-ESO Fibre Object Spectrograph (MEFOS) at the 3.6-m telescope of ESO. The observations are part of a redshift survey of partially obscured galaxies recorded in the course of a deep optical galaxy search behind the southern Milky Way (Kraan-Korteweg [CITE]; Woudt & Kraan-Korteweg [CITE]). A total of 947 galaxies have been observed, a small percentage of the spectra (, 11.5%) were contaminated by foreground stars, and 74 galaxies (7.8%) were too faint to allow a reliable redshift determination. With MEFOS we obtained spectra down to the faintest galaxies of our optical galaxy survey, and hence probe large-scale structures out to larger distances ( km s^-1) than our other redshift follow-ups using the 1.9-m telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory (Kraan-Korteweg et al. [CITE]; Fairall et al. [CITE]; Woudt et al. [CITE]) and the 64-m Parkes radio telescope (Kraan-Korteweg et al. [CITE]). The most distinct large-scale structures revealed in the southern Zone of Avoidance are discussed in context to known structures adjacent to the Milky Way.