We have presented the observation data of optical nuclear spectra and DSS images of a sample of very luminous IRAS galaxies from 2 Jy catalog. In the following paper (Wu et al. 1997, Paper II), we will give the results of spectral analysis and environmental study, in the same time, address the possible model and evolutionary sequence of very luminous IRAS galaxies.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Prof. J.Y. Hu and Dr. J.Y. Wei. Their active cooperation enabled all of the observations to go through smoothly. We also thank Mr. H.J. Yan for kindly providing the extinction data for Xinglong and Prof. J.S. Chen and the rest of his group for help with the data reduction. We are also grateful to Gerard Kriss kindly providing for his procedure SPECFIT. Special Thanks to Dr. C. Young for his hard work of English revision of this paper. Finally, we are most grateful to Dr. Michael Strauss for his valuable advice. This work was partially supported by the Chinese National Science Foundation.