1 Introduction  

In this paper we present near-infrared (NIR) H-band images of a sample of 174 spiral galaxies located in the region of the Pisces-Perseus (PP) supercluster, the largest low-redshift structure in the southern Galactic hemisphere. Although a number of measured infrared magnitudes exist in the literature for some clusters in this area (Aaronson et al. 1986), this is the first large NIR imaging survey of this structure and, together with the published surveys in the Coma supercluster (Gavazzi et al. 1996a,c) and in Virgo (Boselli et al. 1997), it makes up an extended database to investigate the properties of these most outstanding low-redshift superclusters and of their member galaxies. The data were collected to pursue several distinct lines of research: to probe the internal extinction in spiral disks (Moriondo et al. 1998c); to map peculiar motions in the supercluster (Baffa et al. 1993); to study stellar populations and dark matter content (Moriondo et al. 1998a,b).

As detailed in the following section, the galaxies observed pertain to two distinct sets: the first one was observed in the H-band only; the second one in three different passbands: J, H, and K, when possible. We defer the publication and analysis of the colour images to a forthcoming paper, and report here the H-band observations, that is the passband with the largest wealth of data, both in the literature and in our present data set. Although the resulting sample lacks completeness, the data are remarkably homogeneous both because of the type of objects included and for the uniformity in the observational and image reduction techniques. As it will be shown, the sample comprises a fair representation of the bright disk galaxies hosted in the entire supercluster.