1 Introduction

The ESO Slice Project (ESP) galaxy redshift survey, which is described in Vettolani et al. (1997, hereafter Paper I), extends over a strip of $\alpha \times \delta = 22^{\rm o} \times 1^{\rm o}$, plus a nearby area of $5^{\rm o} \times 1^{\rm o}$, five degrees west of the main strip, in the South Galactic Pole region. The right ascension limits are $22^{\rm h} 30^{\rm m}$ and $01^{\rm h} 20^{\rm m}$, at a mean declination of $-40^{\rm o} 15'$ (1950). We have covered this region with a regular grid of adjacent circular fields, with a diameter of 32 arcmin each, corresponding to the field of view of the multifiber spectrograph OPTOPUS (Lund 1986; Avila et al. 1989) at the 3.6 m ESO telescope. The total solid angle of the spectroscopic survey is 23.2 square degrees.

This paper presents the survey data (photometry, spectroscopy, completeness, etc.) which are necessary for a comprehensive study of the sample. It is organized as follows: in Sect. 2 we describe the photometric sample, in Sect. 3 the observations and data reduction and in Sect. 4 the redshift determination. In Sect. 5 we present the catalogue, in Sect. 6 we discuss the possible biases in the sample and the velocity errors, and finally Sect. 7 provides a summary.