1 Introduction

Abell 496 is a cluster of richness class 1 (Abell 1958) located at an average redshift z= 0.0331. We performed a detailed analysis of this cluster from the X-ray point of view, based on ROSAT PSPC data (Pislar 1998).

In the optical, no photometric data had been published, and about 150 redshifts were available from the literature at the beginning of our study (Beers et al. 1991; Malumuth et al. 1992). We undertook a complete analysis of this cluster, with the aim of obtaining both photometric and redshift data at optical wavelengths and couple them with X-ray data. We present here our photometric data. The redshift catalogue is published in a companion paper (Durret et al. 1999) and the analysis of all these combined optical data will be presented in a coming paper (Durret et al. in preparation).