The ESO Nearby Abell Cluster Survey - V. The catalogue: Contents and instructions for use

We present the catalogue resulting from the ESO Nearby Abell Cluster Survey (the ENACS), which contains redshifts and magnitudes for 5634 galaxies in the directions of 107 rich, nearby southern Abell cluster candidates. We describe the contents of the catalogue and discuss the results of a comparison between the ENACS catalogue and the COSMOS Galaxy Catalogue. When cross-correlating the two catalogues we find that, at least in the areas of the ENACS clusters, the completeness of the COSMOS catalogue is somewhat lower than was estimated previously for the carefully analyzed and well-calibrated part of the COSMOS catalogue known as the Edinburgh-Durham Southern Galaxy Survey (EDSGC). The galaxy positions in the COSMOS and ENACS catalogues are found to be on the same system to within about one arcsecond. For the clusters for which the photometry in the ENACS and COSMOS catalogues is based on the same survey plates, the two magnitude scales agree very well. We confirm that the photometric calibration in the EDSGC subset of the COSMOS catalogue is of higher quality than in the EDSGC complement. The ENACS galaxy samples are unbiased subsets of the COSMOS catalogue as far as the projected galaxy distribution is concerned, except in only a few cases. We summarize how the ENACS galaxy samples are subsets of the COSMOS catalogues in the ENACS apertures, with respect to magnitude. For the ENACS catalogue as a whole. We describe the apparent incompleteness at faint magnitudes and towards higher redshifts. Finally, we provide some detailed information about the ENACS catalogue that is essential for its proper statistical use and we summarize some facts that must be remembered when selecting subsets of galaxies from it.