We have presented and described the ENACS redshift catalogue, as well as several aspects of the survey that are relevant in statistical use of the catalogue. From a comparison with the COSMOS Galaxy Catalogue, we conclude that the positional system of the ENACS agrees very well with that of the COSMOS catalogue. A comparison between the magnitude systems of ENACS and COSMOS catalogues shows satisfactory agreement, although the comparison has made us revise the zero-points of the magnitude scales of 14 clusters. Finally, we discuss the way in which the samples of ENACS galaxies are subsets of the total galaxy samples from the COSMOS catalogue. It appears, that the ENACS samples are fair approximations to magnitude limited subsets of the COSMOS catalogue, although our success in obtaining redshifts decreases markedly towards the fainter magnitudes.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the substantial support given to this project by ESO, without which the construction of a dataset for a large, volume-limited cluster sample would have been impossible. We thank Pascal de Theije for providing the analytic description of the completeness in Sect. 4.3. We thank Harvey MacGillivray for providing access to sections of the COSMOS and EDSGC Galaxy Catalogues. We thank the referee, L. Guzzo, for useful comments about the COSMOS catalogue.
We thank our collaborators on what used to be called the ESO Cluster Key Programme, for their contributions.
PK, RdH and AB acknowledge financial support from the Leids Kerkhoven-Bosscha Fonds. AM, AB, CA and PK acknowledge financial contributions from the French GDR Cosmologie and from INSU. JP acknowledges support from the Spanish DCICYT (program PB93-0159).