1. Introduction

The interest of the scientific community on supernovae (SNe) has enormously increased in the recent years for several reasons. The advances in the understanding of the SN phenomena obtained with the intensive study of nearby SNe, first of all SN 1987A, have raised new more fundamental questions with regard to progenitor evolution, explosion mechanism and nucleosynthesis. In addition, the calibration of the absolute magnitudes of a few SNIa obtained using the Cepheid variables found in their parent galaxies (Saha et al. 1999, and references therein), and the discovery of empirical relations between the absolute magnitudes at maximum and the shape of the light curves of SNIa (Phillips 1993; Riess et al. 1996) have renewed the interest for the utilization of SNIa as distance indicators up to cosmological distances. Other exciting advances are expected for the association of some SNe with the mysterious GRBs. Such wide interest has triggered new, deep SN searches which, in a few years have doubled the number of SN discoveries.

The history of the Asiago SN catalogue began in 1984 with the publication of data for 568 objects (Barbon et al. 1984). This was compiled starting from the Palomar Supernova Master List which has since 1958 from time to time appeared in the literature (Zwicky 1958 and 1965; Kowal & Sargent 1971; Sargent et al. 1974). During the same period two other SN listing have been published, by Karpowicz & Rudnicki (1968) and by Flin et al. (1979), the latter giving also the complete bibliography for each object. The 1984 Asiago SN Catalogue was superseded by a new edition in 1989 (Barbon et al. 1989, [ASC89]) which listed information for the 661 supernovae discovered up to December 31, 1988.

More recently, van den Bergh (1994) published a list containing the 203 supernovae discovered between January 1, 1989 and April 3, 1994 and a Catalogue of extragalactic Supernovae, complete up to 1993, was published in volume V of the General Catalogue of Variable Stars (Samus 1995).

In the last few years we made available through the WEB at the URL athena.pd.astro.it/$\sim$supern/ a running SN list which has been widely utilized in the literature. Other supernova listings are available electronically, e.g. the list at the CBAT (www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/Supernovae.html), and that at Sternberg Astronomical Institute (www.sai.msu.su/cgi-bin/wdb-p95/sn/sncat/form).

The many requests for a new, reliable edition give the motivation for the preparation of the present paper.