4 The catalogue

Altogether 769 QSOs candidates have been identified (502 from the MEFOS campaign), 485 of which actually turned out to be emission line extragalactic objects. In Fig. 1 the spectra of all the newly identified objects are shown. The S/N of the spectra permitted to recognize emission-line objects without leaving much doubt of misidentification. Only 15 objects have a dubious redshift identification. In Table 3 the complete list of the 485 emission line objects and their spectroscopic identification is given. The identification classes are: QSO for broad emission line type 1 AGNs (QSOs and Seyfert 1 galaxies); NL for narrow emission line galaxies (such as Seyfert 2, LINERS, Star-burst or HII emissions). The uncertainty in the redshift estimation is of 0.001 rms. At magnitudes brighter than B<18.7 the sample is complete and the QSOs are included in the catalogue of the Homogeneous Bright QSO Survey (HBQS, Cristiani et al. 1995). A "d'' in the comments identify the objects for which the redshift identification is dubious. A total of 429 type 1 AGNs have been identified, 373 in the redshift range $0.3<z\leq2.2$. The photometry has an uncertainty of about 0.1 mag, while the astrometry has an accuracy of 1'' rms.

MEFOS has been decommissioned by ESO in 1995, and consequently at magnitudes fainter than B = 18.7 a fraction of the QSO candidates has not been spectroscopically identified. The fainter sample is not useful for statistical applications aimed at measuring the evolution of the luminosity function of AGNs. However, the sample can be used for analysis of the clustering of QSOs by using the technique of scrambling the redshift distribution in the generation of the "random'' data set used in the computation of the correlation function (see La Franca et al. 1998).

Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to thank the enthusiastic support of the COSMOS and UKST staff. The work was partially supported by the Ministry for University and Research (MURST) under grant COFIN98-02-32.