6 Conclusions

We conducted follow-up spectroscopy for a pilot sample of the Hamburg/SAO Survey for emission-line galaxies. The spectroscopy resulted in the detection or/and quantitative spectral classification of 74 emission-line objects. Of them 55 are newly discovered, and 19 are already known in the literature. For 8 of the latter the redshifts are determined at first time, and for most of the rest emission line ratios are presented at first time. Summarizing the presented description of the selection procedure, the follow-up spectroscopy results and their discussion we conclude:

• The methods used for the selection of ELG candidates on objective prism plates give a sufficiently high fraction of BCGs in the resulting lists of detected ELGs (47 galaxies or 63%), in accordance with the original aim of the Hamburg/SAO survey project.
• Besides of BCGs we found also 4 new quasars and 23 ELGs of other types.
• The overall detection efficiency of emission-line objects for the pilot sample is rather low (about 31%) and should be improved. The performed analysis of the data allowed to formulate additional selection criteria.
• The estimated lower limit of the mean surface number density of BCGs is about 0.21/square degree, similar to that for the BCG samples from the SBS and from the ELG sample in the direction of voids.
• A preliminary comparison of the brightnesses and redshifts of the newly discovered BCGs with those from the samples in the SBS and Case survey zones shows that they are quite similar and thus their combination will create a new homogeneously selected large BCG sample, suitable for the study of the spatial distribution of BCGs.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft No. 436 RUS 17/77/94. A.V.U. is very grateful to the staff of the Hamburg Observatory for their hospitality and kind assistance. SAO authors appreciate the partial financial support from the RFBR grant No. 96-02-16398 and from Russian Center of Cosmoparticle Physics "Cosmion''. The partial support of this work by the INTAS grant No. 96-0500 is acknowledged. We acknowledge the partial support of this project by Russian Ministry of Science and Technology for 6m telescope of SAO RAS (BTA, reg. number 01-43). U.H. acknowledges the support by the SFB 375 Astroteilchenphysik of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The authors thank the anonymous referee for useful notes helping to improve the text. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED).