5. Conclusions

This redshift catalogue will be used, together with our photometric catalogues (which include both the large field catalogue obtained by scanning a photographic plate and the small CCD field catalogue, Slezak et al. 1999), to give an interpretation of the properties of Abell 496 (Durret et al. in preparation). They will be compared to the results already obtained from ROSAT PSPC X-ray data (Pislar 1998).

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Andrée Fernandez for her help during the preparation of the first observing run, to Paul Stein for helping us obtain a catalogue of guiding stars and to Cláudia Mendes de Oliveira for her cheerful and highly competent assistance at the telescope. We also wish to thank the referee, John Huchra, for providing us with the redshift list from the CfA redshift catalogue in the direction of this cluster, and warmly acknowledge the help of Françoise Warin in the data reduction. Last but not least, we are very grateful to Christophe Adami and Andrea Biviano for giving us the catalogue of velocities and R magnitudes taken from the literature in electronic form. C.L. acknowledges financial support by the CNAA (Italia) fellowship reference D.D. No. 37 08/10/1997.