FLASH redshift survey - I. Observations and Catalogue

The FLAIR Shapley-Hydra (FLASH) redshift survey catalogue consists of 4613 galaxies brighter than $\bJ = 16.7$ (corrected for Galactic extinction) over a 605 sq. degree region of sky in the general direction of the Local Group motion. The survey region is an approximately $60\degr \times 10\degr$ strip spanning the sky from the Shapley Supercluster to the Hydra cluster, and contains 3141 galaxies with measured redshifts. Designed to explore the effect of the galaxy concentrations in this direction (in particular the Supergalactic plane and the Shapley Supercluster) upon the Local Group motion, the 68% completeness allows us to sample the large-scale structure better than similar sparsely-sampled surveys. The survey region does not overlap with the areas covered by ongoing wide-angle (Sloan or 2dF) complete redshift surveys. In this paper, the first in a series, we describe the observation and data reduction procedures, the analysis for the redshift errors and survey completeness, and present the survey data.