The symbiotic nova RR Tel is an extraordinary object on account of the richness of its emission line spectrum and of the extremely slow spectral development after the outburst that took place in 1944 (Thackeray 1977). These characteristics have made it an ideal laboratory for studies of astrophysical spectroscopy and for the application of the methods of diagnostics for astrophysical plasmas.
The IUE spectrum of RR Tel has been extensively studied by Penston et al. (1983) and by Hayes & Nussbaumer (1986) but the limited time coverage in the data which were then available prevented any possible study on the long-time variations in the intensities and profiles of the UV emission lines.
More recently, Doscheck & Feibelman (1993), hereinafter DF, have improved the list of the line intensities and identifications from a study centered on a SW spectrum with very long exposure (820 min) taken in June 1983, while Aufdenberg (1993), hereinafter ADB, has combined the data from this same spectrum together with other archival data to produce a composite spectrum. Very recently, Espey et al. (1995) have presented far UV data (900-1800 Å) taken with HUT on March 1995 during the Astro-2 mission.
With the purpose of completing these previous investigations with a specific study on the behavior of the emission lines over a longer time-scale we have measured the emission intensities and the FWHMs in the IUE spectra of RR Tel taken from 1978 to 1993. In this article we list the line measurements for the spectra obtained with the SWP camera (1175-1950 Å), together with some comments and a short description of the most outstanding variations. The measurements and comments for the LW cameras (1950-3200 Å) will be reported in a forthcoming article.