The "stationary'' spectral features at 5780 Å and 5797 Å, observed by
Heger ([1922]) at the Lick Observatory are the first discovered members
of the set of Diffuse Interstellar Bands (DIBs). The interstellar origin of
several strong
DIBs has been proven by Merrill ([1934]), Beals & Blanchet ([1937]),
York ([1971]) and Herbig ([1975]).
The latter work based on photographic spectra
of the S/N ratio enhanced by means of averaging, pointed
the possible existence of weak 5784 and 5795 (near 5797) bands.
These weak DIBs as well as some other similiar features
may be related to some of the strong ones as pointed by Chlewicki
et al. ([1987])
and are more evident in "zeta'' targets - i.e. those in which the strength
ratio of 5797 and 5780 is relatively high (Kreowski & Westerlund
[1988]).
During recent years the number of known DIBs keeps growing.
The paper of Smith et al. ([1981])
suggested that the feature near 6194.5 Å is a very weak
DIB, well seen in spectra of dark interstellar clouds.
Generally many very weak features were successfully detected by
Ferlet et al. ([1983]), Herbig ([1988]) and by Herbig & Leka
([1991])
in the red and near infrared spectral ranges.
The survey of Kreowski & Sneden ([1993]) proved the existence of
very weak DIBs in the vicinity of the 5780 and 5797 bands and shortward of
the 6196 band. Last surveys of Kre
owski et al. ([1995]) and
Kre
owski et al. ([1997]) proved that number of very weak
features grows with resolution and signal-to-noise ratio.
The most complete survey (Jenniskens & Désert [1994]) covered a
broad spectral range from
3800 to
8700 Å in the spectra of
heavily reddened, early type stars. Based on a very small sample (only
four stars) this survey detected hundreds of weak features, some of them
not known in previous works, but the resolution and signal-to-noise ratio
were not high enough to discover very weak DIBs. Also the small sample
has not allowed to investigate the behaviour of the weak vs. strong DIBs
in different environments.
The presented survey is based on high quality spectra of moderately
reddened early spectral type stars. The method of
averaging spectra to get a very high signal-to-noise (Kreowski et al.
[1997]) makes possible to
detect very weak, shallow features never known before.
Results of this survey confirm the existence of the already discovered
features; additionally many new very weak ones were discovered.
These are presented both in tabulated form and as the set of plots
showing the spectra in the whole range of this survey.
Copyright The European Southern Observatory (ESO)